The very nature of operations in peer-to-peer systems such as BitTorrent exposes information about participants to their peers. Nodes desiring anonymity, therefore, often chose to route their peer-to-peer traffic through anonymity relays, such as Tor. Unfortunately, these relays have little incentive for contribution and struggle to scale with the high loads that P2P traffic foists upon them. W...

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 identi...

The application considered responsible for most of the Internet traffic volume is file-sharing. Among the popular file-sharing applications are P2P-based ones, using e. g., the BitTorrent protocol, Web based offers by direct download services (DDS), e. g., rapidshare.com, and NNTP based services, e. g., giganews.com. To cope with the ever growing bandwidth demands ISPs are exploring various opt...