Oh interesting, so it's attacking the DHT layer in addition to the Torrent layer? Clever!
In the torrent layer, any individual torrent client is able to gradually weed out bad actors by identifying slow transfer speeds and/or high rates of hash mismatches. But I'm not familiar with the details of the public torrent DHT -- do individual nodes have any protections in place to identify and ignore bad nodes? Like every other P2P topic I imagine this scenario was comprehensively discussed over a decade ago; what is the optimal response to this attack? Though I imagine the cost to wage this attack is greater than the benefit obtained, so the most likely (and most effective) response is probably "do nothing". -david On Mon, May 14, 2012 at 6:36 AM, Vijay K. Gurbani <v...@bell-labs.com> wrote: > On 05/13/2012 10:20 PM, David Barrett wrote: >> >> Any idea how this thing works (if any)? >> >> >> http://torrentfreak.com/microsoft-funded-startup-aims-to-kill-bittorrent-traffic-120513/ >> >> Is it basically a DoS where it just simulates an overwhelming number >> of fake clients that send garbage data at an incredibly slow rate, or >> something more clever? > > > This looks like Pirate Pay is injecting multiple sybils into the > DHT with node-IDs close to the info-hash of the file, thus making > the sybils responsible for the file. This assures that all queries > are sent to the sybils, allowing the sybils to sent out false > information to the other peers. > > A couple of years ago, some of my colleagues did work on this > in the context of p2p localization. Their paper [1] describes their > results in much more detail. > > [1] http://www.moritzsteiner.de/papers/dht_traffic_localization.pdf > > Thanks, > > - vijay > -- > Vijay K. Gurbani, Bell Laboratories, Alcatel-Lucent > 1960 Lucent Lane, Rm. 9C-533, Naperville, Illinois 60563 (USA) > Email: vkg@{bell-labs.com,acm.org} / vijay.gurb...@alcatel-lucent.com > Web: http://ect.bell-labs.com/who/vkg/ _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list p2p-hackers@lists.zooko.com http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers
