Impact of peer incentives on the dissemination of polluted content

ABSTRACT

Recent studies have reported a new form of malicious behavior in file-sharing Peer-to-Peer systems: content pollution. The dissemination of polluted content in a P2P system has the detrimental effect of reducing content availability, and ultimately, decreasing the confidence of users in such systems. Two potential strategies for polluting P2P content are decoy insertion, which consists of injecting corrupted copies of a file into the system, and hash corruption, which consists of injecting a corrupted file with the same hash code as a non-corrupted one. Polluted content disseminates through P2P networks because users typically do not delete the corrupted files that they download.This paper investigates the effectiveness of peer incentives to delete corrupted files in reducing the dissemination of polluted content, considering the two aforementioned pollution mechanisms. Our simulation results show that the effectiveness of incentives is highly dependent on the pollution mechanism. We show that for a pollution dissemintation techinique called hash corruption, only effective incentive mechanisms are able to avoid spreading of polluted content.

REFERENCES

• 1: Fabricio Benevenuto , Jose Ismael Jr , Jussara Almeida, Quantitative Evaluation of Unstructured Peer-to-Peer Architectures, Proceedings of the 2004 International Workshop on Hot Topics in Peer-to-Peer Systems (HOT-P2P'04), p.56-65, October 08-08, 2004 [doi>10.1109/PTP.2004.17]
• 2: BitTorrent. http://bitconjurer.org/bittorrent/.
• 3: Nicolas Christin , Andreas S. Weigend , John Chuang, Content availability, pollution and poisoning in file sharing peer-to-peer networks, Proceedings of the 6th ACM conference on Electronic commerce, p.68-77, June 05-08, 2005, Vancouver, BC, Canada [doi>10.1145/1064009.1064017]
• 4: eDonkey. http://www.edonkey2000.com/.
• 5: Fasttrack. http://www.fasttrack.com.
• 6: Gnutella. http://www.gnutella.com.
• 7: KaZaA. http://www.kazaa.com.
• 8: James F. Kurose , Keith W. Ross, Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach Featuring the Internet, Pearson Benjamin Cummings, 2004
• 9: J. Liang, R. Kumar, Y. Xi, and K. W. Ross. Pollution in p2p file sharing systems. In Proc. of IEEE Infocom, Miami, FL, USA, March 2005.
• 10: Napster. http://www.napster.com.
• 11: Overpeer. http://www.overpeer.com.
• 12: J. Pouwelse, P. Garbacki, D. Epema, and H. Sips. The bittorrent p2p file-sharing system: Measurements and analysisng. In Proc. of IPTPS, Ithaca, NY, USA, February 2005.
• 13: A. R. The Evolution of Cooperation. Basic Books, 1984.
• 14: Retspan. http://www.retspan.info.
• 15: S. Saroiu, S. D. Gribble, and H. M. Levy. Measurement and analysis of spyware in a university environment. In Proc. of the 1st Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), San Francisco, CA, March 2004.
• 16: S. Saroiu, P. Gummadi, and S. Gribble. A Measurement Study of Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Systems. In Proc. Multimedia Computing and Networking 2002 (MMCN '02), San Jose, CA, USA, January 2002.
• 17: UUHash. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUHash.
• 18: Viralg. http://www.viralg.com.
• 19: Kevin Walsh , Emin Gün Sirer, Fighting peer-to-peer SPAM and decoys with object reputation, Proceeding of the 2005 ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Economics of peer-to-peer systems, August 22-22, 2005, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA [doi>10.1145/1080192.1080204]
• 20: W. Yu, C. Boyer, S. Chellappan, and D. Xuan. Peer-to-peer System-based Active Worm Attacks: Modeling and Analysis. In Proc. of IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC 2005), Seoul, Korea, May 2005.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.4 Distributed Systems

General Terms:
Security

Keywords:
content pollution, peer incentive, peer-to-peer networks