BotTorrent: Misusing BitTorrent to Launch DDoS Attacks

BitTorrent is currently one of the most popular peer-to-peer systems. BitTorrent clients are widely spread all over the world and account for a large fraction of today’s Internet traffic. In this paper, we show that BitTorrent can be exploited by misdirecting clients to send their traffic toward any host on the Internet. The volume of a BitTorrent swarm can thus be converted into firepower for launching a distributed denial-of-service attack that can exhaust the victim’s resources, including access bandwidth and connection resources. We identify novel exploits of the BitTorrent system and conduct real-life experiments that demonstrate the feasibility and severity of such attacks. We characterize the volume, duration and spread of attack traffic observed in our experiments. Finally, we discuss possible fixes and the limits of both attack and defense approaches.