New paper on poisioning and pollution of P2P networks

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Joseph Lorenzo Hall <joehall () gmail com>
Reply-To: <joehall () pobox com>
Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2005 23:20:22 -0800
To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>, Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>
Subject: New paper on poisioning and pollution of P2P networks

Hi Dave, Declan... I thought you two might enjoy this paper. -Joe
---- 

## New paper on poisioning and pollution of P2P networks ##

http://groups.sims.berkeley.edu/pam-p2p/index.php?p=40

[Nicolas Christin][1] has just put the finishing touches on a new
paper authored with [Andreas Weigend][2] and SIMS professor [John
Chuang][3], ["Content Availability, Pollution and Poisoning in File
Sharing Peer-to-Peer Networks"][4] that will be presented at [ACM's
Conference on Electronic Commerce][5] this summer in Vancouver,
Canada. Here is the abstract:

[1]: http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~christin/
[2]: http://www.weigend.com/
[3]: http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~chuang/
[4]: http://p2pecon.berkeley.edu/pub/CWC-EC05.pdf
[5]: http://www.acm.org/sigs/sigecom/ec05/

> Copyright holders have been investigating technological solutions to
  prevent distribution of copyrighted materials in peer-to-peer file
  sharing networks. A particularly popular technique consists in
  poisoning a specific item (movie, song, or software title) by
  injecting a massive number of decoys into the peer-to-peer network,
  to reduce the availability of the targeted item. In addition to
  poisoning, pollution, that is, the accidental injection of unusable
  copies of files in the network, also decreases content
  availability. In this paper, we attempt to provide a first step
  toward understanding the differences between pollution and
  poisoning, and their respective impact on content availability in
  peer-to-peer file sharing networks. To that effect, we conduct a
  measurement study of content availability in the four most popular
  peer-to-peer file sharing networks, in the absence of poisoning, and
  then simulate different poisoning strategies on the measured data to
  evaluate their potential impact. We exhibit a strong correlation
  between content availability and topological properties of the
  underlying peer-to-peer network, and show that the injection of a
  small number of decoys can seriously impact the users perception of
  content availability.

This is a really interesting paper. They measure a number of P2P
network metrics - query response time, temporal stability, spatial
stability and download completion time - using a widely distributed
set of PCs on the [PlanetLab network][6] running scripted P2P
software. This is a clever way to simultaneously study the
characteristics of different P2P networks (notably eDonkey,
eDonky/Overnet, FastTrack and Gnutella) as well as quantitatively
illustrate differences in the underlying network algoritms. The really
nifty part of this paper, in my opinion, involves measuring the
effects of various content poisoning and pollution strategies. Their
results show that fairly simple strategies are fairly simply defeated
while more sophisticated and hybrid strategies aimed at
mucking-up-the-net are difficult to detect and thwart.

[6]: http://www.planet-lab.org/

-- 
Joseph Lorenzo Hall
UC Berkeley, SIMS PhD Student
http://pobox.com/~joehall/
blog: http://pobox.com/~joehall/nqb2/

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