During the last decade, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) applications have been one of the dominant components of Internet traffic. Understanding BitTorrent, by far the most popular P2P protocol for data distribution, is extremely valuable to shed some light on the nature of distributed systems. This paper surveys the existing measurement studies and sets out to verify the acquired corpus of knowledge about ...

Incentive mechanisms play a critical role in P2P systems. Private BitTorrent sites use a novel incentive paradigm, where the sites record upload and download amounts of users and require each user to maintain its upload-to-download ratio above a specified threshold. This paper explores in-depth incentives in private P2P file-sharing systems. Our contributions are threefold. We first conduct a m...

In this paper we conduct a large scale measurement study in order to analyse the fake content publishing phenomenon in the BitTorrent Ecosystem. Our results reveal that fake content represents an important portion (35%) of those files shared in BitTorrent and just a few tens of users are responsible for 90% of this content. Furthermore, more than 99% of the analysed fake files are linked to eit...

Detecting clients with deviant behavior in the Bittorrent network is a challenging task that has not received the deserved attention. Typically, this question is seen as not ’politically’ correct, since it is associated with the controversial issue of detecting copyright protection agencies. However, deviant behavior detection and associated blacklists might prove crucial for the well being of ...

BitTorrent achives great success in its high performance for file distribution. It is commonly believed that this owes to Tit-for-Tat strategy adopted in choking algorithm for incentive in BitTorrent protocol. But there are still many issues in incentive mechanism in BitTorrent. In this paper, we study Tit-for-Tat strategy by constructing a game model in P2P environments and deducing the constr...

The fundamental problem with P2P networks is that quality of service depends on altruistic resource sharing by participating peers. Many peers freeride on the generosity of others. Current solutions like sharing ratio enforcement and reputation systems are complex, exploitable, inaccurate or unfair at times. The need to design scalable mechanisms that incentivize cooperation is evident. We focu...

Recent research efforts have shown that the popular BitTorrent protocol does not strictly enforce fairness and allows free-riding, mainly via optimistic unchokes. This paper proposes a BitTorrent-like protocol, that encourages peers of similar upload bandwidth to be buddies— peers collaborating for mutual benefit. Buddy peers mostly satisfy their download needs through their buddies and perform...

In recent years, there are some major changes in the way content is being distributed over the network. The content distribution techniques have recently started to embrace peer-to-peer (P2P) systems as an alternative to the traditional client-server architecture. P2P systemsthat are based on the BitTorrent protocol uses end-users’ resources to provide a cost effective distribution of bandwidth...

This paper describes a digital forensic tool that uses an FPGA-based embedded software application to identify and track contraband digital files shared using the BitTorrent protocol. The system inspects each packet on a network for a BitTorrent Handshake message, extracts the “info hash” of the file being shared, compares the hash against a list of known contraband files and, in the event of a...

Addressing energy efficiency in P2P services has the potential to make the Internet greener since they comprise a major source of the Internet data traffic. In this paper, we consider approaches for green Internet file sharing. We develop simulation models of proxy-based energy efficient BitTorrent as well as legacy BitTorrent on PeerSim P2P simulator, and explore their characteristics on large...