DDoS Vulnerability Analysis of Bittorrent Protocol

Bittorrent (BT) traffic had been reported to contribute to 30% of the Internet traffic nowadays and the number of participants have been growing rapidly. For such a protocol that significantly involved in the Internet traffic, the robustness and security must be evaluated carefully. In this paper, we analyze the BT protocol and identify several potential vulnerabilities available for malicious Internet users to exploit and leverage them and launch Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. We demonstrate such possibility by launching a DDoS attack using one of the methods studied and reveal some measurements recorded on such attack. We then propose fixes to the existing BT protocol and discuss critical issues when designing a peer-to-peer (P2P) network in the future.