Paper Info
Title
Crawling BitTorrent DHTs for fun and profit
Abstract
This paper presents two kinds of attacks based on crawling the DHTs used for distributed BitTorrent tracking. First, we show how pirates can use crawling to rebuild BitTorrent search engines just a few hours after they are shut down (crawling for fun). Second, we show how content owners can use related techniques to monitor pi-rates' behavior in preparation for legal attacks and negate any perceived anonymity of the decentralized BitTorrent architecture (crawling for profit). We validate these attacks and measure their performance with a crawler we developed for the Vuze DHT. We find that we can establish a search engine with over one million torrents in under two hours using a single desktop PC. We also track 7.9 million IP addresses downloading 1.5 million torrents over 16 days. These results imply that shifting from centralized BitTorrent tracking to DHT-based tracking will have mixed results for the file sharing arms race. While it will likely make illicit torrents harder to quash, it will not help users hide their activities.
Year
Venue
Keywords
2010
WOOT
arms race,decentralized bittorrent architecture,crawling bittorrent dhts,vuze dht,bittorrent search engine,dht-based tracking,bittorrent tracking,centralized bittorrent,search engine,million torrent,million ip
Field
DocType
Citations 
BitTorrent tracker,Crawling,Computer security,Upload,BitTorrent,BitTorrent protocol encryption,Engineering,File sharing,Web crawler,Distributed web crawling
Conference
12
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.87
10
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Scott Wolchok11487.78
J. Alex Halderman22301149.67