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BitTorrent Sync: First Impressions and Digital Forensic Implications

2014-05, Farina, Jason, Scanlon, Mark, Kechadi, Tahar

With professional and home Internet users becoming increasingly concerned with data protection and privacy, the privacy afforded by popular cloud file synchronisation services, such as Dropbox, OneDrive and Google Drive, is coming under scrutiny in the press. A number of these services have recently been reported as sharing information with governmental security agencies without warrants. BitTorrent Sync is seen as an alternative by many and has gathered over two million users by December 2013 (doubling since the previous month). The service is completely decentralised, offers much of the same synchronisation functionality of cloud powered services and utilises encryption for data transmission (and optionally for remote storage). The importance of understanding BitTorrent Sync and its resulting digital investigative implications for law enforcement and forensic investigators will be paramount to future investigations. This paper outlines the client application, its detected network traffic and identifies artefacts that may be of value as evidence for future digital investigations.

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An Analysis of BitTorrent Cross-Swarm Peer Participation and Geolocational Distribution

2014-08-07, Scanlon, Mark, Shen, Huijie

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file-sharing is becoming increasingly popular in recent years. In 2012, it was reported that P2P traffic consumed over 5,374 petabytes per month, which accounted for approximately 20.5% of consumer internet traffic. TV is the popular content type on The Pirate Bay (the world's largest BitTorrent indexing website). In this paper, an analysis of the swarms of the most popular pirated TV shows is conducted. The purpose of this data gathering exercise is to enumerate the peer distribution at different geolocational levels, to measure the temporal trend of the swarm and to discover the amount of cross-swarm peer participation. Snapshots containing peer related information involved in the unauthorised distribution of this content were collected at a high frequency resulting in a more accurate landscape of the total involvement. The volume of data collected throughout the monitoring of the network exceeded 2 terabytes. The presented analysis and the results presented can aid in network usage prediction, bandwidth provisioning and future network design.

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A Week in the Life of the Most Popular BitTorrent Swarms

2010-06-17, Scanlon, Mark, Hannaway, Alan, Kechadi, Tahar

The popularity of peer-to-peer (P2P) file distribution is consistently increasing since the late 1990’s. In 2008, P2P traffic accounted for over half of the world’s Internet traffic. P2P networks lend themselves well to the unauthorised distribution of copyrighted material due to their ease of use, the abundance of material available and the apparent anonymity awarded to the downloaders. This paper presents the results of an investigation conducted on the top 100 most popular BitTorrent swarms over the course of one week. The purpose of this investigation is to quantify the scale of unauthorised distribution of copyrighted material through the use of the BitTorrent protocol. Each IP address, which was discovered over the period of the weeklong investigation, is mapped through the use of a geolocation database, which results in the ability to determine where the participation in these swarms is prominent worldwide.

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Project Maelstrom: Forensic Analysis of the BitTorrent-Powered Browser

2015-09, Farina, Jason, Kechadi, Tahar, Scanlon, Mark

In April 2015, BitTorrent Inc. released their distributed peer-to-peer powered browser, Project Maelstrom, into public beta. The browser facilitates a new alternative website distribution paradigm to the traditional HTTP-based, client-server model. This decentralised web is powered by each of the visitors accessing each Maelstrom hosted website. Each user shares their copy of the websites source code and multimedia content with new visitors. As a result, a Maelstrom hosted website cannot be taken offline by law enforcement or any other parties. Due to this open distribution model, a number of interesting censorship, security and privacy considerations are raised. This paper explores the application, its protocol, sharing Maelstrom content and its new visitor powered 'web-hosting' paradigm.

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Investigating Cybercrimes that Occur on Documented P2P Networks

2013-09-01, Scanlon, Mark, Hannaway, Alan, Kechadi, Tahar

The popularity of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Internet communication technologies being exploited to aid cybercrime is ever increasing. P2P systems can be used or exploited to aid in the execution of a large number of online criminal activities, e.g., copyright infringement, fraud, malware and virus distribution, botnet creation, and control. P2P technology is perhaps most famous for the unauthorised distribution of copyrighted materials since the late 1990’s, with the popularity of file-sharing programs such as Napster. In 2004, P2P traffic accounted for 80% of all Internet traffic and in 2005, specifically BitTorrent traffic accounted for over 60% of the world’s P2P bandwidth usage. This paper outlines a methodology for investigating a documented P2P network, BitTorrent, using a sample investigation for reference throughout. The sample investigation outlined was conducted on the top 100 most popular BitTorrent swarms over the course of a one week period.