Is BitStalker an(other) ACTA prop?
p2pnet view Freedom | P2P:- Is a new application developed by PolyCipher, a Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Cox joint venture, evidence of ISP support for ACTA and a global three-strikes law?
That’s what Soulskill wonders in a Slashdot post.
“I was scanning conference proceedings to come up with ideas for a reading group I run at my workplace, and I noticed an interesting paper from the new IEEE WIFS forensics conference“, he says, continuing:
“Researchers from the University of Colorado have published a technique for tracking BitTorrent users (PDF) by joining and actively probing torrent swarms using low-cost cloud computing services.”
They claim their methods “allowed them to monitor the entire Pirate Bay torrent set for as little as $13/mo using EC2″, says the post, adding:
” But that’s not even the interesting part. Their work appears to have been ‘funded in part through gifts from PolyCipher’ — a broadband ISP consortium.
“That’s right; three major national ISPs funded this round of BitTorrent tracking research, not the MPAA/RIAA?”
Says the abstract to BitStalker: accurately and efficiently monitoring BitTorrent traffic >>>
BitTorrent is currently the most popular peer-to-peer network for file sharing. However, experience has shown that Bit-Torrent is often used to distribute copyright protected movie and music files illegally. Consequently, copyright enforcement agencies currently monitor BitTorrent swarms to identify users participating in the illegal distribution of copyrightprotected files. These investigations rely on passive methods that are prone to a variety of errors, particularly false positive identification.”
To mitigate the potential for false positive peer identification, we investigate the feasibility of using active methods to monitor extremely large BitTorrent swarms. We develop an active probing framework called BitStalker that identifies active peers and collects concrete forensic evidence that they were involved in sharing a particular file. We evaluate the effectiveness of this approach through a measurement study with real, large torrents consisting of over 186,000 peers. We find that the current investigative methods produce at least 11% false positives, while we show that false positives are rare with our active approach.
Says the conclusion:
“BitStalker collects concrete evidence of peers’ participation in file sharing in a way that is robust to tracker pollution, highly accurate, and efficient.
“In contrast, the past and present investigative monitoring strategy consists of tracker server queries and ICMP ping probes. While this method is simple, it is also prone to a variety of significant errors, especially false positive identification, since this monitoring technique does not verify participation in the file sharing. We present an alternative monitoring strategy based on actively probing the list of suspected peers to obtain more conclusive evidence of participation in the file sharing.
“There are several aspects of our approach that warrant additional attention. In particular, a specific definition of what constitutes ‘evidence’ in the context of file sharing across various legal systems should be explored. Also, the general legal issues that this type of monitoring exposes should also be investigated further.”
Stay tuned.
(Cheers, Lars)
..… and identi.ca
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
Slashdot – Major ISPs Help Fund BitTorrent User Tracking Research, March 8, 2010
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March 10th, 2010 at 6:39 pm
“There are several aspects of our approach that warrant additional attention. In particular, a specific definition of what constitutes ‘evidence’ in the context of file sharing across various legal systems should be explored. Also, the general legal issues that this type of monitoring exposes should also be investigated further.”
In other words, they’re just figuring out the legal angle to spin it, to make this marketable to the MAFIAA components and compliants.