26 research outputs found
CGHub: Kick-starting the Worldwide Genome Web
The University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) is under contract with the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to construct and operate the Cancer Genomics Hub (CGHub), a nation-scale library and user portal for cancer genomics data. Â This contract covers growth of the library to 5 Petabytes. The NCI programs that feed into the library currently produce about 20 terabytes of data each month. We discuss the receiver-driven file transfer mechanism Annai GeneTorrent (GT) for use with the library. Annai GT uses multiple TCP streams from multiple computers at the library site to parallelize genome downloads. Â We review our performance experience with the new transfer mechanism and also explain additions to the transfer protocol to support the security required in handling patient cancer genomics data
Improving BitTorrent's Peer Selection For Multimedia Content On-Demand Delivery
The great efficiency achieved by the BitTorrent protocol for the distribution
of large amounts of data inspired its adoption to provide multimedia content
on-demand delivery over the Internet. As it is not designed for this purpose,
some adjustments have been proposed in order to meet the related QoS
requirements like low startup delay and smooth playback continuity.
Accordingly, this paper introduces a BitTorrent-like proposal named as
Quota-Based Peer Selection (QBPS). This proposal is mainly based on the
adaptation of the original peer-selection policy of the BitTorrent protocol.
Its validation is achieved by means of simulations and competitive analysis.
The final results show that QBPS outperforms other recent proposals of the
literature. For instance, it achieves a throughput optimization of up to 48.0%
in low-provision capacity scenarios where users are very interactive.Comment: International Journal of Computer Networks & Communications(IJCNC)
Vol.7, No.6, November 201
Spying the World from your Laptop -- Identifying and Profiling Content Providers and Big Downloaders in BitTorrent
This paper presents a set of exploits an adversary can use to continuously
spy on most BitTorrent users of the Internet from a single machine and for a
long period of time. Using these exploits for a period of 103 days, we
collected 148 million IPs downloading 2 billion copies of contents. We identify
the IP address of the content providers for 70% of the BitTorrent contents we
spied on. We show that a few content providers inject most contents into
BitTorrent and that those content providers are located in foreign data
centers. We also show that an adversary can compromise the privacy of any peer
in BitTorrent and identify the big downloaders that we define as the peers who
subscribe to a large number of contents. This infringement on users' privacy
poses a significant impediment to the legal adoption of BitTorrent
Compromising Tor Anonymity Exploiting P2P Information Leakage
Privacy of users in P2P networks goes far beyond their current usage and is a
fundamental requirement to the adoption of P2P protocols for legal usage. In a
climate of cold war between these users and anti-piracy groups, more and more
users are moving to anonymizing networks in an attempt to hide their identity.
However, when not designed to protect users information, a P2P protocol would
leak information that may compromise the identity of its users. In this paper,
we first present three attacks targeting BitTorrent users on top of Tor that
reveal their real IP addresses. In a second step, we analyze the Tor usage by
BitTorrent users and compare it to its usage outside of Tor. Finally, we depict
the risks induced by this de-anonymization and show that users' privacy
violation goes beyond BitTorrent traffic and contaminates other protocols such
as HTTP
Rethinking Online Privacy in Canada: Commentary on Voltage Pictures v. John and Jane Doe
This article examines the Voltage decision, with the view that the bona fide standard safeguards intellectual property rights at the cost of online privacy rights and will proceed in three parts. Part I provides a brief contextualization of the issues. Part II is an analysis of the Voltage decision. Part III examines how the bona fide standard is a relatively low threshold. This article concludes by considering the possibility of shifting to a higher standard for disclosure, as well as a possible solution for the effect that a higher standard could have on copyright owners
Is Content Publishing in BitTorrent Altruistic or Profit-Driven
BitTorrent is the most popular P2P content delivery application where
individual users share various type of content with tens of thousands of other
users. The growing popularity of BitTorrent is primarily due to the
availability of valuable content without any cost for the consumers. However,
apart from required resources, publishing (sharing) valuable (and often
copyrighted) content has serious legal implications for user who publish the
material (or publishers). This raises a question that whether (at least major)
content publishers behave in an altruistic fashion or have other incentives
such as financial. In this study, we identify the content publishers of more
than 55k torrents in 2 major BitTorrent portals and examine their behavior. We
demonstrate that a small fraction of publishers are responsible for 66% of
published content and 75% of the downloads. Our investigations reveal that
these major publishers respond to two different profiles. On one hand,
antipiracy agencies and malicious publishers publish a large amount of fake
files to protect copyrighted content and spread malware respectively. On the
other hand, content publishing in BitTorrent is largely driven by companies
with financial incentive. Therefore, if these companies lose their interest or
are unable to publish content, BitTorrent traffic/portals may disappear or at
least their associated traffic will significantly reduce
I Know Where You are and What You are Sharing: Exploiting P2P Communications to Invade Users' Privacy
In this paper, we show how to exploit real-time communication applications to
determine the IP address of a targeted user. We focus our study on Skype,
although other real-time communication applications may have similar privacy
issues. We first design a scheme that calls an identified targeted user
inconspicuously to find his IP address, which can be done even if he is behind
a NAT. By calling the user periodically, we can then observe the mobility of
the user. We show how to scale the scheme to observe the mobility patterns of
tens of thousands of users. We also consider the linkability threat, in which
the identified user is linked to his Internet usage. We illustrate this threat
by combining Skype and BitTorrent to show that it is possible to determine the
file-sharing usage of identified users. We devise a scheme based on the
identification field of the IP datagrams to verify with high accuracy whether
the identified user is participating in specific torrents. We conclude that any
Internet user can leverage Skype, and potentially other real-time communication
systems, to observe the mobility and file-sharing usage of tens of millions of
identified users.Comment: This is the authors' version of the ACM/USENIX Internet Measurement
Conference (IMC) 2011 pape