Content pollution quantification in large P2P networks : A measurement study on KAD

Content pollution is one of the major issues affecting P2P file sharing networks. However, since early studies on FastTrack and Overnet, no recent investigation has reported its impact on current P2P networks. In this paper, we present a method and the supporting architecture to quantify the pollution of contents in the KAD network. We first collect information on many popular files shared in this network. Then, we propose a new way to detect content pollution by analyzing all filenames linked to a content with a metric based on the Tversky index and which gives very low error rates. By analyzing a large number of popular files, we show that 2/3 of the contents are polluted, one part by index poisoning but the majority by a new, more dangerous, form of pollution that we call index falsification.