Pollution in P2P file sharing systems

— One way to combat P2P file sharing of copyrighted content is to deposit into the file sharing systems large volumes of polluted files. Without taking sides in the file sharing debate, in this paper we undertake a measurement study of the nature and magnitude of pollution in KaZaA, currently the most popular P2P file sharing system. We develop a crawling platform which crawls the majority of the KaZaA 20,000+ supernodes in less than 60 minutes. From the raw data gathered by the crawler for popular audio content, we obtain statistics on the number of unique versions and copies available in a 24-hour period. We develop an automated procedure to detect whether a given version is polluted or not, and we show that the probabilities of false positives and negatives of the detection procedure are very small. We use the data from the crawler and our pollution detection algorithm to determine the fraction of versions and fraction of copies that are polluted for several recent and old so...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Jian Liang, Rakesh Kumar, Y. Xi, Keith W. Ross
• Keywords: Communications, INFOCOM 2005, P2P file Sharing, file Sharing, file Sharing System