Towards a Robust Pollution Control Mechanism for P2P File Sharing Systems

BitTorrent seems to be the most popular peer-to-peer (P2P) protocol in file sharing communities. Such communities are exposed to content pollution attacks (i.e., dissemination of corrupted files, viruses or other malware), which require a moderation effort from their administrators. The complexity of such a cumbersome task increases as the publishing rate of the disseminated content grows. A recent work showed that anti-P2P companies have aggressively attempted to perform a variety of these attacks against file sharing communities [2]. We investigate a novel strategy to fight pollution and how to apply it to BitTorrent.