Is BitTorrent Unstoppable?

Anti-P2P companies have begun to launch Internet attacks against BitTorrent swarms. We use passive and active Internet measurements to study how successful these attacks are at curtailing the distribution of targeted content. For our active measurements, we develop a crawler that contacts all the peers in any given torrent, determines whether leechers in the torrent are under attack, and identifies the attack peers in the torrent. We use the crawler to investigate 8 top box-office movies. Using passive measurements, we perform a detailed analysis of a recent album that is under attack and evaluate the effectiveness of attacks on leechers. Using private torrents created in Planet Lab, we investigate attacks against the initial seed in the early stages of a torrent. For some of the more interesting attacks, we also develop simple analytical models, giving additional insights into the potential vulnerabilities of BitTorrent. Finally, we address whether the BitTorrent architecture is fundamentally more resilient than earlier file sharing architectures (e.g., Kazaa and eDonkey) against Internet attacks.