Privacy In BitTorrent By Hiding In the Crowd

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."

Comments

Re:Download random data from BitTorrent

[Kjella]

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.