BitTorrent Monitoring System from Air Force Engineers
Engineers at Air Force Institute of Technology are engaged in developing a system to discover the transfer of illegal material over BitTorrent networks
Still under way, the system works like this: it passively checks all traffic to-and-from users, and identifying the BitTorrent header in packets. When such an identification/detection occurs the system makes a comparison between the hash of the file and a list of notorious "bad" hashes. In case of a match, the system logs it to continue investigating it.
According to ArsTechnica, the system employs FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays), meaning – the configurable chips that can perform various functions. If ISPs are going to be lured into installing such tools to slow down p2p traffic and thus have a freer bandwidth heavy issues related to privacy will surely surface.
“Another issue facing such systems is creating a comprehensive set of hashes of copyrighted files in real time. It would very likely be easier to have the sniffers simply log all hashes, then figure out which are the offending ones late” ArsTechnica writes. It goes on saying “but all of this is moot, as the system is easily thwarted by encrypting BitTorrent traffic, which already happens for some 25 percent of BitTorrent traffic today.”
However, the real matter at stake here is whether this sort of system is really necessary. Although in the past BitTorrent meant file sharers finding each other via a centralized tracker that made available to each peer the addresses of other similar peers, nowadays’ BitTorrent clients which can also accomplish this purpose in peer-to-peer way are more and more popular.
