RIAA and MPAA vs. BitTorrent. 1: 0 in favor of p2p networks

For many years, the American Recording and Cinema Association has hired specialists to launch attacks on key nodes of BitTorrent networks, thereby trying to make it difficult for the end user to receive content. Based on recently published research conducted by scientists at New York University, such attacks are extremely ineffective. At best, they slow down the download for a few minutes, and sometimes they go completely unnoticed. Recording and film studios are willing to pay big money to protect their property from distribution in file-sharing networks. They spent millions of dollars on anti-piracy protection systems, such as MediaDefender, whose representatives, in turn, promised to do everything to distribute fake and corrupt downloads.

According to the recently published report by Praitula Dangel, Di Wab and Kate Ross, these countermeasures are nothing more than a waste of time and money. In the document "Measuring and reducing the number of attacks on the BitTorrent network," the researchers show that BitTorrent nodes are hardly affected by any anti-piracy defense systems.

The researchers examined the effectiveness of the two methods of attacks that are used by companies, in particular MediaDefender. The first method is the so-called “fragment attack”. In this case, the attacker tries to slow down the downloads of users by means of constant hash errors (some parts of the downloaded file are transmitted with an error created in advance, which ultimately makes the downloaded file useless). The second type of attack is “connection-error”, when an attacker tries to “tie” the maximum number of TCP connections to his computer (at the same time, there are only structurally similar files on his computer that have nothing to do with the necessary users), as a result of which it becomes impossible get real data.
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These types of attacks were tried when downloading a popular music album. The key nodes of this distribution on the BitTorrent network were attacked by the above methods. "We present the results for the torrent file of the new album, which were obtained during the attack on him," the researchers said, adding, "This popular album was released a few weeks before our experiment. At the time of our research, he was ranked 1st in the UK charts and iTunes rankings. ”

The torrent file under attack was downloaded several times using torrent clients Azureus (Vuze) and uTorrent. For each download, the download completion time was noted with the program for blocking unwanted “attacking” IP addresses on and off.

The results were quite interesting. The researchers found that on average, downloading with the program to block unwanted IPs was 30-35% faster. In other words, the measures of anti-piracy organizations really slow down the download process, but in most cases only by a few minutes, which is clearly not enough to stop the download process as a whole.

A closer look at the principle of distribution of uploaded files in the two above BitTorrent clients makes it clear that without IP filters, uTorrent only accepts 2% of erroneous data packets that use the “fragment attack” method. Azureus, in turn, did not receive a single error packet at all with this kind of attack inside, while it received 18% of erroneous TCP connections (“connection-error”).

Not surprisingly, the researchers concluded that the methods used in the attack of BitTorrent nodes are extremely ineffective. “Anti-piracy companies are now not very successfully fighting the proliferation of protected property through BitTorrent networks. We also came to the conclusion that filtering IP addresses by the blacklist is not capable of restricting all attacks, ”the researchers note. It was noted that both Azureus and uTorrent included algorithms to combat these types of attacks. Of course, the results may differ when compared with other p2p clients. The developers of Azureus (now Vuze) have done a lot of work to prevent "fragmentary attacks", while uTorrent has built in similar tools to combat file distortion.

The conclusion from the entire study appears to be one, and for most readers it is not even surprising. The millions of dollars spent by the entertainment industry to protect the results of their activities from being distributed in peer-to-peer networks is at best only a small difficulty for the “pirates”.

Translation : LMW