Cheating BitTorrent
Written by Ernesto on May 17, 2006BitTorrent is believed to be one of the fairest P2P protocols. The built in tit-for-tat mechanism makes sure that you get what you give. But there are several ways to cheat and exploit BitTorrent in order to increase your download speed.
But how vulnerable is BitTorrent?
Nikitas Liogkas, Robert Nelson, Eddie Kohler, Lixia Zhang from the [...]
BitTorrent is believed to be one of the fairest P2P protocols. The built in tit-for-tat mechanism makes sure that you get what you give. But there are several ways to cheat and exploit BitTorrent in order to increase your download speed.
But how vulnerable is BitTorrent?
Nikitas Liogkas, Robert Nelson, Eddie Kohler, Lixia Zhang from the UCLA Computer Science Department, tested three ways to cheat BitTorrent.
1. Download only from seeds
2. Download from fastest peers
3. Advertise false pieces
They conclude from their research:
“BitTorrent appears quite robust against this kind of exploit: selfish peers can sometimes obtain more bandwidth, and honest peers’ download rates suffer slightly in consequence, but we
observe no considerable degradation of the system’s quality of service.”
Additionally they propose five mechanisms that they believe will contribute to BitTorrent’s robustness.
1. parallel downloading: maintain parallel interactions with multiple peers; enables adaptivity in dynamic conditions
2. client memory: the torrent client remembers where a piece comes from, and is able to punish cheating peers.
3. problem partitioning: decouple data needs from provided service; prevents manipulation by declaring false info
4. export minimal information: hide exploitable information, who’s a seed for example.
5. keep the network connected: random choice in optimistic unchoking prevents clustering and starvation
Link to the article for more info: pdf | html
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8 Responses
“random choice in optimistic unchoking prevents clustering and starvation”
wow, I was just saying the same thing last week!
;)
Hmm there’s always a cheat foir everything eh. It is a pity that bit torrenting would have its cheats too as there are already most of the users blatantly selfish anyway!! For those idiots to be able to cheat without being noticed then the whole system would be affected, how much I can’t say. Sometimes I wonder if it is just being held up by the core of seeders who might be about 20-30% of users, carrying the other 70% of selfish so called ‘hit n run’ users.
Who knows.
Who cares?
I was wondering how robust Bittorent would be against serious attack. If someone could generate data with the same hash as any piece of the file (birthday problem), then the file could be corrupted without anyone noticing. Does anyone think this would be possible?
thank god for unselfish seeders!!
whats worse than a 4.5 gig torrent not working after days of waiting?!
I would just like a way to increase my upload amount without actually having to upload, not because I want to rip anyone off but the site I download has a share ratio rule… Now I live in the country and am limited to dial up but when I lived in the city I had broadband and shared almost always more than downloading but now it is hard to achieve those same stats. Anyone know of a way I can alter my upload stats without consuming any bandwidth?
mike try the ratiomaster.. google it
A 4.6 gig torrent?
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