The Evaluation of Index Poisoning in BitTorrent

Abstract

In recent year, some popular P2P file-sharing systems have been identified to be polluted by the copyright Industry to control the unauthorized distribution of content. As one of the most common P2P pollution methods, the index poisoning controls the P2P file-sharing by inserting massive numbers of bogus records into the index of the P2P file-sharing system. In this paper, the index poisoning in the structured P2P file-sharing system is introduced firstly. A term “poison multiplication” is defined to describe the level of the poisoning and the probability model that a peer receives valid peer information on the condition of the index poisoning in BitTorrent is proposed. We run index poisoning in BitTorrent and evaluate the effect of it. The result of the evaluation shows that with the poison multiplication increases, the connection time and the randomness of the connection time increases. To our knowledge, this is the first study to employ BitTorrent as the platform to evaluate the effectiveness of the index poisoning.