Spying the world from your laptop: identifying and profiling content providers and big downloaders in BitTorrent

Authors:
Stevens Le Blond;Arnaud Legout;Fabrice Lefessant;Walid Dabbous;Mohamed Ali Kaafar
Affiliations:
I.N.R.I.A, France;I.N.R.I.A, France;I.N.R.I.A, France;I.N.R.I.A, France;I.N.R.I.A, France
Venue:
LEET'10 Proceedings of the 3rd USENIX conference on Large-scale exploits and emergent threats: botnets, spyware, worms, and more
Year:
2010

Citing 5
Cited 9

Modeling and performance analysis of BitTorrent-like peer-to-peer networks

Proceedings of the 2004 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications
Rarest first and choke algorithms are enough

Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement
One hop reputations for peer to peer file sharing workloads

NSDI'08 Proceedings of the 5th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation
Challenges and directions for monitoring P2P file sharing networks-or: why my printer received a DMCA takedown notice

HOTSEC'08 Proceedings of the 3rd conference on Hot topics in security
Dynamic swarm management for improved BitTorrent performance

IPTPS'09 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Peer-to-peer systems

Is content publishing in BitTorrent altruistic or profit-driven?

Proceedings of the 6th International COnference
Crawling BitTorrent DHTs for fun and profit

WOOT'10 Proceedings of the 4th USENIX conference on Offensive technologies
One bad apple spoils the bunch: exploiting P2P applications to trace and profile Tor users

LEET'11 Proceedings of the 4th USENIX conference on Large-scale exploits and emergent threats
I know where you are and what you are sharing: exploiting P2P communications to invade users' privacy

Proceedings of the 2011 ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement conference
Distribution of digital games via BitTorrent

Proceedings of the 15th International Academic MindTrek Conference: Envisioning Future Media Environments
Content publishing and downloading practice in bittorrent

IFIP'12 Proceedings of the 11th international IFIP TC 6 conference on Networking - Volume Part II
Patterns in the distribution of digital games via BitTorrent

International Journal of Advanced Media and Communication
Unveiling the incentives for content publishing in popular BitTorrent portals

IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
TorrentGuard: Stopping scam and malware distribution in the BitTorrent ecosystem

Computer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

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.