Showing papers presented at "International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing in 2010"

Spotify -- Large Scale, Low Latency, P2P Music-on-Demand Streaming

Abstract: Spotify is a music streaming service offering low-latency access to a library of over 8 million music tracks Streaming is performed by a combination of client-server access and a peer-to-peer protocol In this paper, we give an overview of the protocol and peer-to-peer architecture used and provide measurements of service performance and user behavior The service currently has a user base of over 7 million and has been available in six European countries since October 2008 Data collected indicates that the combination of the client-server and peer-to-peer paradigms can be applied to music streaming with good results In particular, 88% of music data played comes from Spotify's servers while the median playback latency is only 265 ms (including cached tracks) We also discuss the user access patterns observed and how the peer-to-peer network affects the access patterns as they reach the server

LifeSocial.KOM: A P2P-Based Platform for Secure Online Social Networks

Abstract: Online social networks with millions of users are very popular nowadays. They provide a platform for the users to present themselves and to interact with each other. In this paper, we present a totally distributed platform for social online networks based on the p2p paradigm, called LifeSocial.KOM. It provides the same functionality as common online social networks, while distributing the operational load on all participating nodes. LifeSocial.KOM is plugin-based and extendible, provides secure communication and user-based data access control and integrates a monitoring component which allows the users and operators to observe the quality of the distributed system.

Unraveling BitTorrent's File Unavailability: Measurements and Analysis

Abstract: BitTorrent suffers from one fundamental problem: the long-term availability of content. This occurs on a massive-scale with 38% of torrents becoming unavailable within the first month. In this paper we explore this problem by performing two large-scale measurement studies including 46K torrents and 29M users. The studies go significantly beyond any previous work by combining per-node, per-torrent and system-wide observations to ascertain the causes, characteristics and repercussions of file unavailability. The study confirms the conclusion from previous works that seeders have a significant impact on both performance and availability. However, we also present some crucial new findings: (i) the presence of seeders is not the sole factor involved in file availability, (ii) 23.5% of nodes that operate in seedless torrents can finish their downloads, and (iii) BitTorrent availability is discontinuous, operating in cycles of temporary unavailability.

Online Data Backup: A Peer-Assisted Approach

Abstract: In this work we study the benefits of a peer- assisted approach to online backup applications, in which spare bandwidth and storage space of end- hosts complement that of an online storage service. Via simulations, we analyze the interplay between two key aspects of such applications: data placement and bandwidth allocation. Our analysis focuses on metrics such as the time required to complete a backup and a restore operation, as well as the storage costs. We show that, by using adequate bandwidth allocation policies in which storage space at a cloud provider can be used temporarily, hybrid systems can achieve performance comparable to traditional client-server architectures at a fraction of the costs. Moreover, we explore the impact of mechanisms to impose fairness and conclude that a peer-assisted approach does not discriminate peers in terms of performance, but associates a storage cost to peers contributing with little resources.

Understanding Peer Exchange in BitTorrent Systems

Abstract: Peer Exchange (PEX), in which peers directly exchange with each other lists of active peers in the torrent, has been widely implemented in modern BitTorrent clients for decentralized peer discovery However, there is little knowledge about the behavior of PEX in operational systems In this paper, we perform both passive measurements and Planetlab experiments to study the impact and properties of BitTorrent PEX We first study the impact of PEX on the download efficiency of BitTorrent We observe that PEX can significantly reduce the download time for some torrents We then analyze the freshness, redundancy and spread speed of PEX messages Finally, we also conduct large- scale Planetlab experiments to understand the impact of PEX on the overlay properties of BitTorrent

Waiting for Anonymity: Understanding Delays in the Tor Overlay

Abstract: Although Tor is the most widely used overlay for providing anonymity services, its users often experience very high delays. Because much of Tor usage is for Web applications, which are sensitive to latency, it is critical to reduce delays in Tor. To take an important step in this direction, we seek an in-depth understanding of delays in Tor. By taking snapshots of the entire Tor network within a short time window, we are able to study the delay distribution of the entire router population. We also monitor delays introduced by individual Tor routers over extended periods of time. Our results indicate that apart from delays introduced by routers, overlay network latency also plays a significant role in delays in Tor. We have also observed that at any time, there exist huge differences in the delays introduced by different routers. Our results reveal key performance characteristics of Tor system behavior and provide valuable insights for improving the Tor performance.

QoE in Pull Based P2P-TV Systems: Overlay Topology Design Tradeoffs

Abstract: -This paper presents a systematic performance analysis of pull P2P video streaming systems for live applications, providing guidelines for the design of the overlay topology and the chunk scheduling algorithm. The contribution of the paper is threefold: 1) we propose a realistic simulative model of the system that represents the effects of access bandwidth heterogeneity, latencies, peculiar characteristics of the video, while still guaranteeing good scalability properties; 2) we propose a new latency/bandwidth-aware overlay topology design strategy that improves application layer performance while reducing the underlying transport network stress; 3) we investigate the impact of chunk scheduling algorithms that explicitly exploit properties of encoded video. Results show that our proposal jointly improves the actual Quality of Experience of users and reduces the cost the transport network has to support.

Measurements, Analysis and Modeling of Private Trackers

Abstract: BitTorrent plays a very important role in the current Internet content distribution. The enormous impact of public and private trackers should not be overlooked. Public trackers are suffering from free-riding problem, but private trackers are becoming more and more popular and they run very well in terms of an effective Share Ratio Enforcement (SRE) which is an auxiliary incentive mechanism. In this paper, we have crawled and traced 15 trackers with 3.5 million torrents for over 6 months. We first provide taxonomy of private trackers, and then present in breadth and depth measurement from the user viscosity, torrents evolution, user behaviors, content distribution and other metrics. Some features are apparently different from public trackers. Furthermore, we analyze SRE mechanism and point/credit system, and use game theory to study the effectiveness of SRE. There exists "uploading starvation" phenomenon in private trackers. We model SRE mechanism and preliminary propose an improved SRE mechanism to further incent users and enhance the performance of private trackers.

Can P2P-Users Benefit from Locality-Awareness?

Abstract: Locality-awareness is considered as a promising approach to increase the efficiency of content distribution by peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, e.g., BitTorrent. It is intended to reduce the inter-domain traffic which is costly for Internet service providers (ISPs) and simultaneously increase the performance from the viewpoint of the P2P users, i.e, shorten download times. This win-win situation should be achieved by a preferred exchange of information between peers which are located closely to each other in the underlying network topology. A set of studies shows that these approaches can lead to a win-win situation under certain conditions, and to a win-no lose situation in most cases. However, the scenarios used assume mostly homogeneous peer distributions and that all peers have the same access speed. This is not the case in practice according to several measurement studies. Therefore, we extend previous work in this paper by studying scenarios with real-life, skewed peer distributions and heterogeneous access bandwidths of peers. We show that even a win-no lose situation is difficult to achieve under those conditions and that the actual impact for a specific peer depends heavily on the used locality-aware peer selection and the concrete scenario. Therefore, we conclude that current proposals need to be refined so that users of P2P networks can be sure that they also benefit from their use. Otherwise, a broad acceptance of the concept of locality-awareness in the user community of P2P networks will not take place.

Autonomous NAT Traversal

Abstract: Traditional NAT traversal methods require the help of a third party for signalling. This paper investigates a new autonomous method for establishing connections to peers behind NAT. The proposed method for autonomous NAT traversal uses fake ICMP messages to initially contact the NATed peer. This paper presents how the method is supposed to work in theory, discusses some possible variations, introduces various concrete implementations of the proposed approach and evaluates empirical results of a measurement study designed to evaluate the efficacy of the idea in practice.

The Impact of Caching on BitTorrent-Like Peer-to-Peer Systems

Abstract: Peer-to-peer file-sharing systems are responsible for a significant share of the traffic between Internet service providers (ISPs) in the Internet. In order to decrease their peer-to-peer related transit traffic costs, many ISPs have deployed caches for peer-to-peer traffic in recent years. We consider how the different types of peer-to-peer caches - caches already available on the market and caches expected to become available in the future - can possibly affect the amount of inter-ISP traffic. We develop a fluid model that captures the effects of the caches on the system dynamics of peer-to-peer networks, and show that caches can have adverse effects on the system dynamics depending on the system parameters. We combine the fluid model with a simple model of inter-ISP traffic and show that the impact of caches cannot be accurately assessed without considering the effects of the caches on the system dynamics. We identify scenarios when caching actually leads to increased transit traffic. Our analytical results are supported by extensive simulations and experiments with real BitTorrent clients.

PeerDedupe: Insights into the Peer-Assisted Sampling Deduplication

Abstract: As the digital data rapidly inflates to a world-wide storage crisis, data deduplication is showing its increasingly prominent function in data storage. Driven by the problems behind the mainstream server-side deduplication schemes, recently there has been a tendency of introducing peer-assisted methods into the deduplication systems. However, this topic is still quite vague at present and lacks thorough research. In this paper, we conduct in-depth and quantitative investigation on the peer-assisted deduplication. Through measurements we observe that the inter-peer duplication accounts for a large proportion of the total duplication, and exhibits strong peer locality. Then based on our observations, we propose PeerDedupe, a novel peer-assisted sampling deduplication approach. Experiments show that PeerDedupe can remove over 98% duplication with each peer coordinating with no more than 5 other peers, and it requires much less server RAM usage than the existing works.

Boosting Gossip for Live Streaming

Abstract: Gossip protocols are considered very effective to disseminate information in a large scale dynamic distributed system. Their inherent simplicity makes them easy to implement and deploy. However, whereas their probabilistic guarantees are often enough to disseminate data in the context of low- bandwidth applications, they typically do not suffice for high-bandwidth content dissemination: missing 1% is unacceptable for live streaming. In this paper, we show how the combination of two simple mechanisms copes with this seemingly inherent deficiency of gossip: (i) codec, an erasure coding scheme, and (ii) claim², a content- request scheme that leverages gossip duplication to diversify the retransmission sources of missing information. We show how these mechanisms can effectively complement each other in a new gossip protocol, gossip++, which retains the simplicity of deployment of plain gossip. In a realistic setting with an average bandwidth capability (800kbps) close to the stream rate (680kbps) and 1% message loss, plain gossip can provide at most 99% of the stream. Using gossip++, on the other hand, all nodes can view a perfectly clear stream.

Towards Plugging Privacy Leaks in the Domain Name System

Abstract: Privacy leaks are an unfortunate and an integral part of the current Internet domain name resolution. Each DNS query generated by a user reveals -- to one or more DNS servers -- the origin and the target of that query. Over time, users' communication (e.g., browsing) patterns might become exposed to entities with little or no trust. Current DNS privacy leaks stem from fundamental features of DNS and are not easily fixable by simple patches. Moreover, privacy issues have been overlooked by DNS security efforts (such as DNSSEC) and are thus likely to propagate into future versions of DNS. In order to mitigate privacy issues in DNS, this paper proposes a Privacy-Preserving DNS (PPDNS), that offers privacy during domain name resolution. PPDNS is based on distributed hash tables (DHTs), an alternative naming infrastructure, and computational private information retrieval (cPIR), an advanced cryptographic construct. PPDNS takes advantage of the DHT index structure to provide name resolution query privacy, while leveraging cPIR to reduce communication overhead for bandwidth-sensitive clients. Our analysis shows that PPDNS is a viable approach for obtaining a reasonably high level of privacy for name resolution queries. PPDNS also serves as a demonstration of blending advanced systems techniques with their cryptographic counterparts.

Online Video Using BitTorrent and HTML5 Applied to Wikipedia

Abstract: Wikipedia started a project in order to enable users to add video and audio on their Wiki pages. The technical downside of this is that its bandwidth requirements will increase manifold. BitTorrent-based peer-to-peer technology from P2P-Next (a European research project) is explored to handle this bandwidth surge. We discuss the impact on the BitTorrent piece picker and outline our ''tribe'' protocol for seamless integration of P2P into the HTML5 video and audio elements. Ongoing work on libswift which uses UDP, an enhanced transport protocol and integrated NAT/Firewall puncturing, is also described.

Addressing the P2P Bootstrap Problem for Small Overlay Networks

Abstract: Peer-to-Peer (P2P) overlays provide a framework for building distributed applications consisting of few to many resources with features including self-configuration, scalability, and resilience to node failures. Such systems have been successfully adopted in large-scale Internet services for content delivery networks, file sharing, and data storage. In small-scale systems, they can be useful to address privacy concerns as well as support for network applications that lack dedicated servers. The bootstrap problem, finding an existing peer in the overlay, remains a challenge to enabling these services for small-scale P2P systems. In large networks, the solution to the bootstrap problem has been the use of dedicated services, though creating and maintaining these systems requires expertise and resources, which constrain their usefulness and make them unappealing for small-scale systems. This paper surveys and summarizes requirements that allow peers potentially constrained by network connectivity to bootstrap small-scale overlays through the use of existing public overlays. In order to support bootstrapping, a public overlay must support the following requirements: a method for reflection in order to obtain publicly reachable addresses, so peers behind network address translators and firewalls can receive incoming connection requests; communication relaying to share public addresses and communicate when direct communication is not feasible; and rendezvous for discovering remote peers, when the overlay lacks stable membership. After presenting a survey of various public overlays, we identify two overlays that match the requirements: XMPP overlays, such as Google Talk and Live Journal Talk, and Brunet, a structured overlay based upon Symphony. We present qualitative experiences with prototypes that demonstrate the ability to bootstrap small-scale private structured overlays from public Brunet or XMPP infrastructures.

Can Realistic BitTorrent Experiments Be Performed on Clusters

Abstract: Network latency and packet loss are considered to be an important requirement for realistic evaluation of Peer-to-Peer protocols. Dedicated clusters, such as Grid'5000, do not provide the variety of network latency and packet loss rates that can be found in the Internet. However, compared to the experiments performed on testbeds such as PlanetLab, the experiments performed on dedicated clusters are reproducible, as the computational resources are not shared. In this paper, we perform experiments to study the impact of network latency and packet loss on the time required to download a file using BitTorrent. In our experiments, we observe a less than 15% increase on the time required to download a file when we increase the round-trip time between any two peers, from 0 ms to 400 ms, and the packet loss rate, from 0% to 5%. Our main conclusion is that the underlying network latency and packet loss have a marginal impact on the time required to download a file using BitTorrent. Hence, dedicated clusters such as Grid'5000 can be safely used to perform realistic and reproducible BitTorrent experiments.

Improving Accuracy and Coverage in an Internet-Deployed Reputation Mechanism

Abstract: P2P systems can benefit from reputation mechanisms to promote cooperation and help peers to identify good service providers. However, in spite of a large number of proposed reputation mechanisms, few have been investigated in real situations. BarterCast is a distributed reputation mechanism used by our Internet-deployed Bittorent-based file-sharing client Tribler. In BarterCast, each peer uses messages received from other peers to build a weighted, directed subjective graph that represents the upload and download activity in the system. A peer calculates the reputations of other peers by applying the maxflow algorithm to its subjective graph. For efficiency reasons, only paths of at most two hops are considered in this calculation. In this paper, we identify and assess three potential modifications to BarterCast for improving its accuracy and coverage (fraction of peers for which a reputation value can be computed). First, a peer executes maxflow from the perspective of the node with the highest betweenness centrality in its subjective graph instead of itself. Second, we assume a gossiping protocol that gives each peer complete information about upload and download activities in the system, and third, we lift the path length restriction in the maxflow algorithm. To assess these modifications, we crawl the Tribler network and collect the upload and download actions of the peers for three months. We apply BarterCast with and without the modifications on the collected data and measure accuracy and coverage.

BitMON: A Tool for Automated Monitoring of the BitTorrent DHT

Abstract: The distributed hash table (DHT) formed by BitTorrent has become very popular as a basis for various kinds of services. Services based on this DHT often assume certain characteristics of the DHT. For instance, for realizing a decentralized bootstrapping service a minimum number of peers running on a certain port are required. However, key characteristics change over time. Our measurements show that e.g. the number of concurrent users grew from 5 to over 7 millions of users during the last months. For making reliable assumptions it is thus essential to monitor the P2P network. This demo presents BitMON, a Java-based out-of-the-box platform for monitoring the BitTorrent DHT. This tool does not only crawl the network, but also automatically analyzes the collected data and visualizes the results. BitMON monitors the DHT's size in peers as well as the peers' IP addresses, port numbers, countries of origin and session length. Also, the long-term evolution of these indicators can be graphically displayed. Furthermore, BitMON is designed as a framework and can easily be extended or adapted to monitor other P2P networks.

Availability and Redundancy in Harmony: Measuring Retrieval Times in P2P Storage Systems

Abstract: Peer-to-peer (P2P) storage systems are strongly affected by churn - temporal and permanent peer failures. Because of this churn, the main requirement of such systems is to guarantee that stored objects can always be retrieved. This requirement is specially needed in two main situations: when users want to access the stored objects or when data maintenance processes have to repair lost information. To meet this requirement, exiting P2P storage systems introduce large amounts of redundancy that maintain data availability close to 100%. Unfortunately, these large amounts of redundancy increase the storage costs, either by reducing the overall net capacity or by increasing the communication required for data maintenance. In order to minimize storage costs, P2P storage systems can reduce data redundancy. However, less redundancy means lower data availability, which leads to increase object retrieval times. Unfortunately, longer retrieval times could compromise data maintenance processes and could penalize user's retrieval times. It is crucial then for P2P storage systems to predict the effects of a redundancy reduction. In order to provide this information, we present a novel analytical framework to measure object retrieval times under different redundancy and churn circumstances. Our framework can be directly used by backup applications aiming to maintain durability at the lower cost, or by data sharing applications that seek to reduce costs by penalizing user retrieval times. We validate our framework by simulation using real P2P traces (Skype and eMule's KAD).

Hivory: Range Queries on Hierarchical Voronoi Overlays

Abstract: The problem of defining a support for multidimensional range queries on P2P overlays is currently an active field of research. Several approaches based on the extension of the basic functionalities offered by Distributed Hash Tables have been recently proposed. The main drawback of these approaches is that the locality required for the resolution of a range query cannot be guaranteed by uniform hashing. On the other way, locality preserving hashing functions do not guarantee a good level of load balancing. This paper presents Hivory, a P2P overlay based on a Voronoi tessellation defined by the objects published by peers. Each object is mapped to a site of the Voronoi tessellation and the corresponding Delaunay Triangulation defines the P2P overlay. A hierarchy of Voronoi diagrams is defined by exploiting clusters of objects paired with the same site of the Voronoi diagram. A new Voronoi diagram including the peers of the cluster is created so that the query resolution may be refined by a top down visit of the Voronoi hierarchy. The paper presents the proposed solution, analysis its complexity, and provides a set of experimental results.

IMP: ISP-Managed P2P

Abstract: Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have failed to independently reduce the cost peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic Traffic- throttling devices increase user download times, and caches store content that may infringe copyright We propose ISP-Managed P2P (IMP): a transparent peer-discovery service that returns peers favorable to ISPs Unlike similar services, IMP does not require the direct support of developers who have no incentive to cooperate This paper covers the design, implementation, and experimental evaluation of our IMP prototype, which reduces costly, cross-ISP traffic by eight times without significantly increasing user download times

A QoE-Aware P2P Streaming System Using Scalable Video Coding

Abstract: P2P streaming has attracted much attention recently with promises for higher revenues and better load distribution. Still, the majority of P2P video streaming systems today employ the one-size-fits-all concept where the same video bit-rate is offered to all users. Here the promising H.264/Scalable Video Coding (SVC) standard is seen as a necessity in not only supporting heterogeneous resources, but also in reducing the impact of P2P dynamics on the perceived Quality-of-Experience (QoE). In this demonstration we present our streaming application that uses SVC to adapt to different user requirements and resources. The application employs a novel QoE- aware layer selection algorithm that maximizes flexibility through SVC while taking impact on QoE into consideration.

ASAP Top-k Query Processing in Unstructured P2P Systems

Abstract: Top-k query processing techniques are useful in unstructured peer-to-peer (P2P) systems, to avoid overwhelming users with too many results. However, existing approaches suffer from long waiting times. This is because top-k results are returned only when all queried peers have finished processing the query. As a result, query response time is dominated by the slowest queried peer. In this paper, we address this users' waiting time problem. For this, we revisit top-k query processing in P2P systems by introducing two novel notions in addition to response time: the stabilization time and the cumulative quality gap. Using these notions, we formally define the as-soon-as-possible (ASAP) top-k processing problem. Then, we propose a family of algorithms called ASAP to deal with this problem. We validate our solution through implementation and extensive experimentation. The results show that ASAP significantly outperforms baseline algorithms by re- turning final top-k result to users in much better times

Do BitTorrent-Like VoD Systems Scale under Flash-Crowds?

Abstract: The efficiency of BitTorrent for file sharing has inspired a number of BitTorrent-based P2P protocols for Video-on-Demand (VoD). It has been shown that these systems are scalable in steady-state: the service quality provided to the users does not depend on the number of users in the system. However, it is not well understood how these systems scale under flash-crowds. In this work, we model a general BitTorrent-like VoD system and we find that under a flash-crowd the quality-of-service (QoS) degrades with the number of users. Also, our analysis shows that, at the very beginning of a flash-crowd, the maximum number of simultaneous users that can obtain a given service level is intrinsically related to two fundamental system parameters, namely the initial service capacity and the efficiency of piece exchange of the underlying P2P protocol. Finally, we illustrate the impact of peers turning into seeders (i.e peers that have finished downloading and remain in the system to upload) on the system scale.

Measurement and Analysis of BitTorrent Traffic in Mobile WiMAX Networks

Abstract: As mobile Internet environments are becoming dominant, how to revamp P2P operations for mobile hosts is gaining more and more attention. In this paper, we carry out empirical traffic measurement of BitTorrent service in various settings (static, bus and subway) in commercial WiMAX networks. To this end, we analyze the connectivity among peers, the download throughput/stability, and the signaling overhead of mobile WiMAX hosts in comparison to a wired (Ethernet) host. We find out the drawbacks of BitTorrent operations in mobile Internet are characterized by lower connection ratio, unstable connections amongst peers, and higher control message overhead.

Local Access to Sparse and Large Global Information in P2P Networks: A Case for Compressive Sensing

Abstract: In this paper we face the following problem: how to provide each peer local access to the full information (not just a summary) that is distributed over all \emph{edges} of an overlay network? How can this be done if local access is performed at a given rate? We focus on \emph{large and sparse} information and we propose to exploit the compressive sensing (CS) theory to efficiently collect and pro-actively disseminate this information across a large overlay network. We devise an approach based on random walks (RW) to spread CS random combinations to participants in a random peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay network. CS allows the peer to compress the RW payload in a distributed fashion: given a constraint on the RW size, e.g., the maximum UDP packet payload size, this amounts to being able to distribute larger information and to guarantee that a large fraction of the global information is obtained by each peer. We analyze the performance of the proposed method by means of a simple (yet accurate) analytical model describing the structure of the so called CS sensing matrix in presence of peer dynamics and communication link failures. We validate our model predictions against a simulator of the system at the peer and network level on different models of random overlay networks. The model we developed can be exploited to select the parameters of the RW and the criteria to build the sensing matrix in order to achieve successful information recovery. Finally, a prototype has been developed and deployed over the PlanetLab network to prove the feasibility of the proposed approach in a realistic environment. Our analysis reveals that the method we propose is feasible, accurate and robust to peer and information dynamics. We also argue that centralized and other distributed approaches, i.e., flooding and gossiping, are unfit in the context we consider.

Performance Evaluation of Peer-to-Peer Gaming Overlays

Abstract: In this demo we present a performance evaluation testbed for peer-to-peer gaming overlays. It consists of a 3D first person shooter game that is designed to run in a simulated network environment as well as on a real network. Simulation with autonomous players (bots) guarantees scalability, a controlled workload, and reproducible results; a prototype deployment on a real network can then validate the simulation results. The information dissemination overlay pSense is implemented as a first subject for evaluation.

SPADS: Publisher Anonymization for DHT Storage

Abstract: Many distributed applications, such as collaborative Web mapping, collaborative feedback and ranking, or bug reporting systems, rely on the aggregation of privacy-sensitive information gathered from human users. This information is typically aggregated at servers and later used as the basis for some collaborative service. Expecting that clients trust that the user-centric information will not be used for malevolent purposes is not realistic in a fully distributed setting where nodes are not under the control of a single administrative domain. Moreover, most of the time the origin of the data is of small importance when computing the aggregation onto which these services are based. Trust problems can be evinced by ensuring that the identity of the user is dropped before the data can actually be used, a process called publisher anonymization. Such a property shall be guaranteed even if a set of servers is colluding to spy on some user. This also requires that malevolent users cannot harm the service by sending any number of items without being traceable due to publisher anonymization. Rate limitation and decoupled authentication are the two mechanisms that ensure that these cheating users have a limited impact on the system. This paper presents SPADS, a system that interfaces to any DHT and supports the three objectives of publisher anonymization, rate limitation and decoupled authentication. The evaluation of a deployed prototype on a cluster assesses its performance and small footprint.

Verifiable Encryption for P2P Block Exchange

Abstract: Free-riding is an important problem in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file-sharing networks. When peers refuse to contribute upload bandwidth, the whole network can collapse. A relatively new free-riding vulnerability in BitTorrent is the Large View Exploit, in which a peer connects to as many other peers as possible to increase the chance to get free data. This exploit can not be thwarted by tit-for-tat-like mechanisms which have traditionally been used to ban free-riding. Several approaches have been proposed to combat the Large View Exploit in fully decentralized systems, most of which rely on encryption. However, the use of regular encryption makes it impossible to verify the correctness of received data. In this paper we propose a novel encryption method which does allow verification of the plaintext data without decryption, at the expense of encryption strength. We show that a colluding peer still has to send data that is at least 40% of the size of the original data to allow decryption.