BitTorrent Darknets

Abstract—A private BitTorrent site (also known as a “BitTorrent darknet”) is a collection of torrents that can only be accessed by members of the darknet community. The private BitTorrent sites also have incentive policies which encourage users to continue to seed files after completing downloading. Although there are at least 800 independent BitTorrent darknets in the Internet, they have received little attention in the research community to date. We examine BitTorrent darknets from macroscopic, medium-scopic and microscopic perspectives. For the macroscopic analysis, we consider 800+ private sites to obtain a broad picture of the darknet landscape, and obtain a rough estimate of the total number of files, accounts, and simultaneous peers within the entire darknet landscape. Although the size of each private site is relatively small, we find the aggregate size of the darknet landscape to be surprisingly large. For the medium-scopic analysis, we investigate content overlap bet...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Chao Zhang, Prithula Dhungel, Di Wu, Zhengye Liu, Keith W. Ross
• Keywords: Bittorrent Darknets, Communications, Darknet Landscape, INFOCOM 2010, Private Site