Controlling File Distribution in the Share Network Through Content Poisoning

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file sharing applications have dramatically increased in popularity for the past few years. Although a P2P file sharing network shares many files, it does not usually have a management and control mechanism for the files exchanged. Consequently, copyright infringement and malware propagation in P2P file sharing networks have become prevalent. In order to prevent these file distribution, content poisoning has attracted much attention recently. Although content poisoning aims to obfuscate users by diffusing a lot of poisoned chunks in P2P networks, its effect to the networks have not been well studied yet. In this paper, we apply content poisoning to “Share”, one of the most popular P2P file sharing applications in Japan, to control its file distribution. Our evaluation includes how effective our proposed content poisoning method to a live Share network composed of over 100,000 active peers. The evaluation result shows that our content poisoning method decreases the number of peers that complete file download to less than 5% compared to the case without our control. Our content poisoning method also reduces additional traffic required for poisoning to 4%.