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."

Comments

Actually

[Renraku]

Actually, poisoning P2P networks as a commercial venture could be prosecuted as theft-by-deception.

Stealing bandwidth is a crime. Downloading songs isn't, if you aren't profiting form it.

Freenet

[evanbd]

The paper won't download here, so I'm asking without RTFA, but how can this work against Freenet? Do they discuss Freenet in the paper at all? Freenet does chunk-level hashing, and the network enforces that the data matches the hash at all steps. Nodes returning invalid data will rapidly get dropped by their peers. Attacks like this are something that Freenet is explicitly designed to prevent. Also, the anonymity guarantees that Freenet makes would make it hard (potentially very hard) for them to identify a single user, let alone "collusion".

I'm forced to wonder whether the researchers mention Freenet at all, or if the poster is simply lumping Freenet in with other p2p apps that it has very little in common with. (Bittorrent and Freenet should be similar in some ways to their resistance against this attack, but Freenet's strong anonymity guarantees should make it more resistant. The fact that a node engaged in widespread poisoning will have trouble even staying connected makes Freenet even more resistant.)

Re:Freenet

[calmofthestorm]

This is utterly absurd. The verification on freenet is based on asymmetric crypto. If they haven't broken that, the most they can do is flood the network with corrupt chunks, in which case the software will just start dropping peers who send too many corrupt packets at too high a rate. Translation: you need # of bad guys >> # of good guys to have much of an impact on network quality. And of course it's complete trash against a darknet, but I doubt these guys know what that is.

Given the subject matter, weasel words, and shoddy methodology, I'm about as worried about this as I am about the zombie communist terrorist invasion predicted for 2012.