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Researchers Outline Targeted Content Poisoning For P2P Data
Diomidis Spinellis writes "Two USC researchers published a paper in the prestigious IEEE Transactions on Computers that describes a technique for p2p content poisoning targeted exclusively at detected copyright violators. Using identity-based signatures and time-stamped tokens they report a 99.9 percent prevention rate in Gnutella, KaZaA, and Freenet and a 85-98 percent prevention rate on eMule, eDonkey, and Morpheus. Poison-resilient networks based on the BitTorrent protocol are not affected. Also the system can't protect small files, like a single-song MP3. Although the authors don't say so explicitly, my understanding is that the scheme is only useful on commercial p2p distribution systems that adopt the proposed protocol."
We need to fight against this kind of tyranny. Make sure to keep ourselves armed with the latest knowledge on how to defeat and subvert these 'poisons'. These corporate moneymongers are sad that they can only buy 3 boats this year instead of two, while we are stuck paying $25 for a CD. The system of money is an ancient and outdated system that needs replaced with a resource based economy anyway, and P2P is a good step in the right direction.
Abstract: Today's peer-to-peer (P2P) networks are grossly abused by Illegal distributions of music, games, video streams, and popular software. These abuses have resulted in heavy financial loss in media and content industry. Collusive piracy is the main source of intellectual property violations within the boundary of P2P networks. This problem is resulted from paid clients (colluders) illegally sharing copyrighted content files with unpaid clients (pirates). Such an on-line piracy has hindered the use of open P2P networks for commercial content delivery. We propose a proactive poisoning scheme to stop colluders and pirates from working together in alleged copyright infringements in P2P file sharing. The basic idea is to detect pirates with identity- based signatures and time-stamped tokens. Then we stop collusive piracy without hurting legitimate P2P clients. We developed a new peer authorization protocol (PAP) to distinguish pirates from legitimate clients. Detected pirates will receive poisoned chunks in repeated attempts. A reputation-based mechanism is developed to detect colluders. The system does not slow down legal download from paid clients. The pirates are severely penalized with no chance to download successfully in finite time. Based on simulation results, we find 99.9% success rate in preventing piracy on file-level hashing networks like Gnutella, KaZaA,Area, LimeWire, etc. Our protection scheme achieved 85-98% prevention rate on part-level hashing networks like eMuel, Shareaz, eDonkey, Morpheus, etc. Our new scheme enables P2P technology for building a new generation of content delivery networks (CDNs). These P2P-based CDNs provide faster delivery speed, higher content availability, and cost-effectiveness than using conventional CDNs built with huge network of surrogate servers.
This isn't unbiased in the least. Sure, arguably it is "research" but calling them researchers from an university makes them seem neutral at best.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
And so is DDoS attacks, but that sure didn't stop the RIAA from using MediaDefender ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaDefender )
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
What's to prevent poisoning legal p2p? There are plenty of examples of copyrights being inappropriately asserted. The technology itself doesn't discriminate.
Humans had discovered methods to speedily and automatically transmit mountainous volumes of data. It was a new frontier, a utopia where information was shared peacefully between the people who wanted to see it. And what was its downfall? Not the anarchists, or the communists, or the Islamic fundamentalists, but the so called leaders of the free world.
"We had to do it," they said, "there is such a thing as too much freedom."
Poison-resilient networks based on the BitTorrent protocol are not affected.
So, the most effective method of P2P is the one that's immune. Really, Edonkey? who uses that? Find yourself a good private BT tracker and be done with it. There are many to choose from. Not only are they immune to content filtering, but due to ratio requirements and the possibility of getting banned if you misidentify content you upload, they're immune to content poisoning as well as data poisoning and have pretty much guaranteed high speed across the board.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
They lump Freenet into the category of "Gnutella-like networks", and say that their attack against gnutella should also work against Freenet since it is Gnutella-like (p.2 and p.12).
In other words, it is as you said, they are lumping it together with other networks.
It makes me question the quality of their research if they think that Freenet is so similar to Gnutella that the same class of attacks would work against both.
Plenty of people already do it - heck even the musicians are starting to turn away from RIAA-backing labels. The RIAA however has found another way to keep their businesses alive: government bailouts. Just like GM, Ford, Chrysler and a host of other companies that couldn't cut it in the new world, they are now being funded by the government which just creates a law about who should pay for these old businesses. Who's paying for it now: the radio stations. The government has decided that the radio stations should pay the RIAA for songs they play. Over the years, the labels have paid DJ's to promote their music (payola), gotten free airtime etc. etc. and now they expect the radio stations to pay it all back. They already pushed the internet radio stations to pay more for the right to play any song, now they are pushing the am/fm radio stations to pay for the rights to play any song.
The RIAA has effectively become through lobbying a government agency. They are being allowed to tax anybody who plays or makes public any type of music in any type of way even if the musician or label is not signed with them.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
I read the summary as them finding a way to create a p2p network of 'customers' (clients who pay to be in your p2p network where you deliver paid content) and protecting yourself from the 'customers' who 'collude' (e.g. hacked client s/w?) with non paying client s/w to allow non paying customers to get the content. I don't think it's about subverting an existing network, it's about protecting a network from subversion. If so then the techniques could presumably be used for other purposes, poisoning surveillance perhaps.
It's entirely possible that the authors do fundamentally believe in the rights of the copyright industry, but that doesn't mean they might not be frightfully ignorant of any number of closely related technologies.
In fact my experience has shown me that fundamentalists tend to be the most narrowly focused people I meet (whatever their beliefs).
Quack, quack.
Freenet is a hard target. Arguably, the hardest of them all today. It's also the least popular.
The studios are playing a money game. Bang for buck. They want maximal deterrence for minimal spend.
Much like virus-writers aim viruses at the highest targets on the "adoption-by-the-masses"/"soft-bellyness" index, RIAA go-getem's do the same thing.
FastTrack - high adoption, soft belly.
Torrent - high adoption, not-so-soft... and segregated into lots of independent share-specific networks.
Freenet - low adoption, practically impossible to break.
It's a no-brainer. They've got no reason to go for the last. They may be greedy scum, but they're not that stupid with their money. Freenet would need to be adopted by the masses and get a ridiculous amount of media exposure to even pop up on their radar. Their goal is not to technically "stop filesharing" altogether, they realize that's a waste of money and effort. Their goal is to mitigate it by taking pot-shots at just the targets that are easy to break, and leave the harder ones alone (for now).
Being an informed geek, that actually makes me really happy. In a nutshell, It means we won.
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Resale of something you got free, ie. radio-copied mixtapes, bootleg cd/dvds, hosting files on a private pay access ftp, etc.
Yeah, there are HUGE profits from selling radio copied mix tapes. (Especially if you use the new 8-track format.)
Really, these are things you literally couldn't give away. Anyone who wants these and isn't fussed about copyright has no problem downloading it himself, or swapping with a friend.
They already tried this about five years ago with poisoned servers. What happened? The Kad search mechanism was adopted and the servers were useless.
The same thing will happen here, the protocol will change, the poisoners will have wasted a lot of money and achieved nothing.
No sig today...
I'm not sure if I missed the last line of the summary in my haste to read to the PDF file, or if the summary was updated, but the last line of the summary is correct and it pretty well refutes the rest of the summary-as-written. The earlier statements in the summary about success rates in blocking particular existing networks are wrong. Those blocking percentages are modeled results *if* those sorts of networks were to become paid access networks implemented this deliberate poisoning capability into their design.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
That's the empression I got too but that still creates a massive "WHY?" in my head.
Why the need for a 'private' P2P network that's not really private at all? If 'pirates' can get into your network, the problem isn't solved by poisoning.
Even if the content providers used a public network, there must be a better way, such as encryption and key exchanges.
And... And this is the killer: it only takes one person to move content from a 'private' network to a public network and they're fucked.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.