Technology Review
A new tool promises to detect illegal files without slowing network traffic.
A new technique has been developed for detecting and tracking illegal content transferred using the BitTorrent file-trading protocol. According to its creators, the approach can monitor networks without interrupting the flow of data and provides investigators with hard evidence of illicit file transfers.
Contraband files might include pirated movies, music, or software, and even child pornography. When the tool detects such a file, it keeps a record of the network addresses involved for later analysis, says Major Karl Schrader, who led the work at the Air Force Institute of Technology, in Kettering, OH.
The use of peer-to-peer (P2P) software and of the BitTorrent protocol in particular have increased steadily over recent years. In fact, for many Internet service providers (ISPs), the vast majority of Internet traffic now consists of P2P transfers.
ISPs are generally only interested in detecting this type of traffic in order to control, or "throttle," it and free up bandwidth for other uses. However, this approach reveals nothing about the contents of each transfer, says Schrader. A handful of network-monitoring tools can identify specific BitTorrent files, but the process is generally slow, since the contents of each file have to be examined. The time that this takes also increases exponentially as the number of files that need to be scanned grows.
"Our system differs in that it is completely passive, meaning that it does not change any information entering or leaving a network," says Schrader. It works, he says, by first spotting files that bare the hallmark of the BitTorrent protocol by examining the first 32 bits of the files' header data. Then the system looks at the files' hash, a unique identifying code used to coordinate the simultaneous download of hundreds of file fragments by different users. If a hash matches any stored in a database of prohibited hashes, then the system will make a record of the transfer and store the network addresses involved.
"I'm convinced that the solution works and that it will be quite cheap, as it is very specialized," says Hendrik Schulze, chief technology officer of Ipoque, a network analysis company based in Leipzig, Germany. More generalized solutions that try to monitor for a wide range of file types may be more flexible, he says, but they will also be more expensive.
One reason why the new technique is so fast is that the apparatus required consists of a specially configured field programmable gate array (FPGA) chip and a flash-memory card that stores a log of the illicit activity.
Video is clogging the Internet. How we choose to unclog it will have far-reaching implications.
Use of a peer-to-peer program called BitTorrent is way up--and that could be bad news for opponents of file sharing.
Great. We're all criminals now. This dovetails nicely with the feds wiretapping every phone conversation in the country. Screw the 4th amendment - the founders were off their rockers, right? All hail Big Brother!
Piracy, Damned Piracy, and P2P
I agree with the readers of this tome who worry that this witch hunt bodes ill. DRM has taken on a life of it's own and threatens communication and data x-fer. The guardians of the Internet will view any encryption as toxic piracy because to do otherwise would be negligent. If their statistical and heuristic algorithms are a bit lame who will know or care? If history is a predictor, the punishment for alleged transgression will be astonishing and if you fight a legal battle, you'll be road kill. If there is to be a 'balance' between the needs of the populace vs corporations, then public harm far outweighs corporate. I doubt if the owners of the net will see it this way.
Seriously, how do these "researchers" plan on figuring out which BitTorrent traffic is legitimate and legal (YES, there is a ton of legal torrents!) and which is pirated content when the traffic is ENCRYPTED??? Most of the Bittorrent traffic is now ENCRYPTED by default! Most of the Open Source Bittorrent clients come with ENCRYPTION bit turned ON!
Take a look here for a short list of legal sites: newteevee.com/2007/03/03/ten-sites-for-free-and-legal-torrents/ There's many more that are legal. There are also companies that use Bittorrent as a CDN delivery! Also, perfectly legal.
Bittoreent is a PROTOCOL! Just like HTTP (web) and SMTP (mail) can be used for good and evil, so can bittorrent!
Their claims that they can somehow figure out what's legal and what's not are ridiculous when most of the traffic is encrypted and I'm shocked that TR would publish this tripe.
Dave
Your first few paragraphs talk about ISPs trying to identify and throttle bittorrent traffic. The rest of your article talks about a method of identifying bittorrent files. This technology is clearly designed to identify bittorrent files, not traffic (as in, my_pirated_movie.bitttorrent) since it talks about identifying the file by header (which doesn't make any sense for bitttorrent traffic because of the diversity of the files transfered via bittorrent. Second, it talks about the hash, which (unless they are computing the hash of a file by collecting all the file fragments sent over bittorrent, recombining them, and running a checksum on the complete file) is only stored in the *.bitttorrent file itself.
Therefore THIS ARTICLE IS TALKING ABOUT TECHNOLOGY TO TRACK AND LOG PERFECTLY LEGAL ACTIVITY. If this software were ever used it would very likely violate privacy protection laws because it is READING THE FILE BEING TRANSFERED, NOT CHECKING METADATA.
This is nothing more than a backdoor method of putting toll booths on the Internet. They couldn't care less about the artists, their only concern is to increase THEIR profits in a sneaky way.
File Hashes can be easily changed
Just add a bunch of noops at the beginning and that will change the file hash
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Charbax
4 Comments
Encrypted BitTorrent is easy
Using encrypted BitTorrent is super easy, it takes just to click on another .torrent file, or installing another BitTorrent client that supports encrypted activity. Using such encryption is exactly just as easy for the average user as installing a new Napster, Kazzaa, Emule or BitTorrent software on their computer.
Analysing hashes, measuring traffic and all that could be very useful though. But it shouldn't be to stop or to punish children that download pirated stuff, it should be about measuring popularity of stuff to then pay the artists from a music tax according to the popularity and the quality of the content.
Publishers, distributors, record labels, movie studios and TV channels, all of these intermediaries have become completely irrelevant and useless with the advent of the Internet which quite obviously makes it possible for the artists to distribute their works directly to the public. Politicians need to recognize that fact and a new law should block those useless intermediaries from corrupting artists and stop them from trying to keep controlling the media. The new media is out of their control.
$5 per citizen per month will pay for many more artists and much better art.
Reply
enantiomer2000
66 Comments
Re: Encrypted BitTorrent is easy
I don't want to pay a tax on media that the public consumes. A lot of what is popular, I don't find entertaining, why should I help pay for American Idol or The Biggest Loser? Pretty much the only media I watch comes from Japan or China.
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bugme
29 Comments
Re: Encrypted BitTorrent is easy
Your point is that encrypted traffic can't be analyzed this way.
But the article isn't talking about analyzing bittorrent traffic, its talking about analyzing the downloading of *.bittorrent files.
I'm fairly certain the author doesn't understand the difference.
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mrstan
2 Comments
Sniffing Out Illicit BitTorrent Files
I am an avid bit-torrent downloader, and my purpose for using this media as such is to check the content to see if it is a movie or music which I would enjoy. I fully understand the artist's need to be paid for their work, but I do not think I need to pay for a crappy movie or song which I have purchased in good faith either with no way to recoup my cost for such poor quality work. If I like the media which I download, I buy a copy for me... and sometimes I download a copy which I already have bought the rights of viewing (DVD or CD for example) simply because it is a format that I can put on my ipod or digital car media player. I truly think that most people downloading these forms of media are doing so legally and honorably, but mind you this.. the bad people are mostly in other countries, not the USA. I see this commonly in chat room conversations, and other communications. Other countries do not have these restrictions like the movie or music industries are pushing down our throats. I think it is time for us in the USA to stand up for OUR rights and call for the squelching of this discrimination based on our being Americans, and so being "attackable".
You companies need to get those guys in other counbtries and leave us alone!
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