Destabilizing BitTorrent's clusters to attack high bandwidth lechers
Mugundhan Rajarajan, Florian Adamsky, Hassan Aqeel Khan, Syed Ali Khayam, Rudolf Jäger · City Research Online (City University London) · 2011
BitTorrent protocol incentivizes sharing through its choking algorithm.BitTorrent choking algorithm creates clusters of leechers with similar upload capacity to achieve higher overall transfer rates.We show that a malicious peer can exploit BitTorrent's choking algorithm to reduce the upload utilization of high bandwidth leechers.We use a testbed comprising of 24 nodes to provide experimental evidence of a distributed attack in which the malicious peers increase the download time for high bandwidth leechers by up to 16 % and increases average download time of the swarm by up to 15 % by using distributed and loosely-coupled malicious peers which comprise only 4.7 % of the swarm.The countermeasures of this attack are a part of our ongoing research work.