Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Privacy In BitTorrent By Hiding In the Crowd

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the even-kids-can-still-find-waldo dept.

pinguin-geek writes "Researchers at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University have identified a new 'guilt-by-association' threat to privacy in peer-to-peer (P2P) systems that would enable an eavesdropper to accurately classify groups of users with similar download behavior. While many have pointed out that the data exchanged over these connections can reveal personal information about users, the researchers shows that only the patterns of connections — not the data itself — is sufficient to create a powerful threat to user privacy. To thwart this threat, they have released SwarmScreen, a publicly available, open source software that restores privacy by masking a user's real download activity in such a manner as to disrupt classification."

5 of 240 comments (clear)

  1. So now not only am I guilty being a linux nerd by Captian+Spazzz · · Score: 2, Interesting

    But now this thing will start running kiddie porn and illegal software, viruses and Malware though my connection as well so that I don't get classified as any.

    I'd love to see what defence you use when your door gets bashed in in the middle of the night.

  2. "Little Brother" come to life by yourexhalekiss · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It seems like more and more of Cory Doctorow's book "Little Brother" is coming to life. In relation to this article, see chaff.

  3. Re:Download random data from BitTorrent by Kjella · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If you actually read the details you will find that it's not really random, but random from a set you give it. So, if you give swarmscreen a site w/, legal software, then it would only download from there.

    Unless there's a significant overlap between both sources causing confusion on whether you're downloading legal or illegal content, I don't see how it can work. If it's as distinct as they say it should be easy to create a signature of legal sites and subtract any connections to them from your total bittorrent presence, effectively dissolving the smoke screen.

    --
    Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
  4. Re:only works with by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Like circular arguments much?

    Whats the point of buying ram if you are not going to use it. If you have more ram, why not use it all?

    Nice

  5. Re:only works with by Ilgaz · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It took uTorrent guys 1 or more years to ship a OS X version even while their code is still i386 only. The idea of "run on every platform which has a sane Java and support everything" will keep sending developers/researchers to Vuze no matter how much it is attacked by Java and even paid commercial content hating hating people.

    Let me remind again that uTorrent is NOT an open source software which is also owned by MPAA/RIAA members partners Bittorrent.com.

    They do a great job hiding that fact lately it seems.