Candidate Talk

  • Prithula Dhungel, Polytechnic Institute of NYU; Jin Li, Microsoft

In the recent past, anti-P2P companies have successfully curtailed the distribution of targeted content over a number of P2P file-sharing systems, including Kazaa and eDonkey. More recently, anti-P2P companies have begun to attack BitTorrent. In this talk, I will focus on the resilience of of BitTorrent to two broad classes of attacks: (i) attacks directly against leechers; and (ii) attacks against seeds in the early stages of a torrent. To analyze BitTorrent’s vulnerabilities to attacks, we employ extensive measurement studies, including active and passive measurements of ongoing attacks in the wild, and attacks within private torrents running over PlanetLab. To obtain meaningful results, we consider several popular implementations of BitTorrent clients and seeds, including Azureus, and BitTornado. For attacks against leechers, our measurement results show that the anti- P2P companies are largely unsuccessful. On the other hand, for attacks against seeds, the measurement results show that if the attackers can discover the torrent quickly enough, they may be able to “nip it in the bud”.

Speaker Details

I received a Bachelor’s in Computer Engineering from Tribhuvan University, Nepal (2003). After that, I went to Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand where I completed my Master’s in Computer Science (2006). Currently, I am a PhD candidate at Polytechnic Institute of NYU, Brooklyn, NY. My research advisor is Prof. Keith W. Ross. I am interested in the areas of Peer-to-Peer networks, Network Security, Network Measurement and Analysis.

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