Test Results Reveal – P2P Filters Can Be Easily Evaded

The MPAA’s recent suggestions that ISP-based P2P filters would be a proper solution to the Internet’s tube congestion led to Hollywood becoming very fervent with its demands for such filters. However, we have to ask ourselves – is that really so? Fortunately, we are not alone in this – others have already thought of finding out how things truly behave. According to NewTeeVee the French music industry association SNEP recently joined forces with Internet Evolution to do just that. Their plan was to run a wide-ranging test with products from numerous vendors and publish the results online which would allow ISPs to be well informed before making decisions.

But there’s a long way from an idea and its fulfillment. It seems that out of 28 vendors invited to participate in the six-month test 24 of them politely said no. Further on, three of the remaining five rejected the test results as being incorrect and didn’t give their consent to their publication. Now that’s just what makes us wonder – is it possible that the filtering industry might fear the news about its products not working too well would get out?

Eventually, only U.S.-based Arbor Networks and Germany’s Ipoque granted the publication of their appliance’s test results. Naturally, the two companies were happy to claim the test results as a total success. The reason is obvious: both appliances performed well with detecting and regulating BitTorrent and other regular P2P protocols in real time as well, having detection rates for unencrypted traffic going up to 97 %.

Apart from this pirates everywhere are not yet to be discourged. We learn that neither of the vendors’ tools proved the same strong capability when encrypted P2P traffic was faced them. The Arbor appliance didn’t manage to detect BitTorrent traffic with strong RC4 encryption at all, and Ipoque could only deal with about 50 percent of all cases when of encrypted BitTorrent traffic occurred.

More good news for those wicked pirates – both devices failed to detect any encrypted eMule traffic. This leaves especially Ipoque quite uneasy and with a red cheek, as the company’s own data clearly indicates that Emule is responsable for nearly a third of all P2P traffic in Germany, Ipoque’s original country.