As the BitTorrent has become one of the most popular peer-to-peer file sharing systems, various security threats appear based on its operation. In this paper, we analyzed the vulnerabilities of the BitTorrent protocol, and surveyed existing attacks on the protocol. Then, we classified the attacks from the protocol’s operational viewpoints. Basically, the protocols are categorized into two parts...

Peer-to-Peer file-sharing networks are garnering a significant share of home broadband networks. Since 2001, BitTorrent has been one of the most popular protocols for file-sharing. What makes BitTorrent so unique compared to past efforts is that it provides a builtin mechanism to ensure the fair distribution of content and prevents selfishness on the part of peers using game theoretical “tit-fo...

The Internet has experienced two major revolutions. The first was the emergence of the World Wide Web, which catapulted the Internet from being a scientific and academic network to becoming part of the societal infrastructure. The second revolution was the appearance of the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) applications, spear-headed by Napster. The popularity of P2P networking has lead to a dramatic increase...

The BitTorrent peer-to-peer file-sharing system attempts to build robustness to free-riding by implementing a tit-for-tat-like strategy within its protocol. It is often believed that this strategy alone is responsible for the the high-levels of cooperation found within the BitTorrent system. However, we highlight some of the weaknesses of the approach and indicate where it would be easy to chea...

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer (p2p) protocol for file-sharing. Its improvement over other file-sharing protocols is its tit-for-tat strategy to decide to whom a peer should upload. This means that an upload to a peer depends on the download from that peer. This paper investigates the BitTorrent upload algorithm and proposes a new algorithm which is based on a distributed optimisation problem whe...

This paper presents the most accurate empirical study to date to characterize and quantify the amount of content of various types that is transferred worldwide using BitTorrent, the dominant peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing application. Using data we collected from the largest public BitTorrent tracker over 106 days between August 2010 and February 2011 and a new methodology, we find that for so...

BitTorrent is one of the Internet’s most efficient content distribution protocols. It is known to perform very well over the wired Internet where end-to-end performance is almost guaranteed. However, in wireless ad hoc networks, many constraints appear as the scarcity of resources and their shared nature, which make running BitTorrent with its default configuration not lead to best performances...

BitTorrent is one of the Internet’s most efficient content distribution protocols. It is known to perform very well over the wired Internet where end-to-end performance is almost guaranteed. However, in wireless ad hoc networks, many constraints appear as the scarcity of resources and their shared nature, which make running BitTorrent in such an environment with its default configuration not le...

BitTorrent is the most successful peer-to-peer system and has attracted a lot of attention from the research community. Researchers have studied a number of aspects of the system, including its scalability, performance, efficiency and fairness. However, the complexity of the system has forced most researchers to make a number of simplifying assumptions, e.g. user homogeneity, or even ignore som...

In recent years BitTorrent has become a notorious contributor to Internet traffic. Not only is BitTorrent responsible for over one third of all Internet traffic, but an immoderate amount of it is expensive cross-ISP or even inter-continental traffic. Much of BitTorrent’s long-distance traffic is due to its random selection of peers, which can cause connected peers to be at very different locati...