Clustering and sharing incentives in BitTorrent systems
Proceedings of the 2007 ACM SIGMETRICS international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems
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BitTorrent protocol incentivizes sharing through its choking algorithm. BitTorrent choking algorithm creates clusters of leechers with similar upload capacity to achieve higher overall transfer rates. We show that a malicious peer can exploit BitTorrent's choking algorithm to reduce the upload utilization of high bandwidth leechers. We use a testbed comprising of 24 nodes to provide experimental evidence of a distributed attack in which the malicious peers increase the download time for high bandwidth leechers by up to 16% and increases average download time of the swarm by up to 15% by using distributed and loosely-coupled malicious peers which comprise only 4.7% of the swarm. The countermeasures of this attack are a part of our ongoing research work.