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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."
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."
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.
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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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...
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.
My annoyance is that "they" presume my downloading means they are losing money. I've been downloading a lot of recent movies lately, and no surprise, the movies are largely crap piled upon more crap (how they ever scored 7 or higher on imdb.com is a mystery to me). The RIAA/MPAA make the assumption that if I had not downloaded, I would have bought the DVD instead.
They presume wrong.
Out of some 20 movies downloaded there was precisely 1 that I will probably buy on DVD, and that's only because my niece wants to see Hannah Montana in 3D. Otherwise I don't waste my money on Hollyweird's shit unless it's exceptionally good. This past 2008-9 season almost nothing met that criteria. So for them to say, "We lost $400," is completely and totally inaccurate.
They are liars. They lost nothing because I'm not a spender. My money gets invested into the stockmarket, not shiny discs, which probably pisses them off.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I see that they gave percentages for prevention rates, but not for false positives. As someone who uses P2P legitimately (Linux distros, movies like Star Wreck, SHN and FLAC files the musician wants shared, etc) this pisses me off no end.
A false positive here is simply vandalism. If these researchers release this thing to the public and there are any false positives at all, they deserve to be jailed.
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