Hybrid and Anonymous File-Sharing Environments: Architecture and Characterisation
Résumé
Most of our daily activities are carried out over the Internet, from file-sharing and social networking to home banking, online-teaching and online-blogging. Considering file-sharing as one of Internet top activities, different architectures have been proposed, designed and implemented, leading to a wide set of file-sharing networks with different performances and goals. This digital society enables as well users' profiling. As Internet users surf the World Wide Web, every sent or received packet passes through several intermediate nodes until they reach their intended destination. So, an observer will be able to determine where a packet comes from and where it goes to, to monitor and to profile users' online activities by identifying to which server they are connected or how long their sessions last. Meanwhile, anonymous communications have been significantly developed to allow users to carry out their online activities without necessarily revealing their real identity. Our contribution is twofold. On the one hand, we consider hybrid file-sharing environments, with a special focus on widely deployed real-world networks and targeting two defined goals. The first goal is to improve content indexation in the BitTorrent file-sharing environment, enabling BitTorrent content to be indexed in the Kad distributed has table and leading to a more robust BitTorrent system. The second goal is to improve content availability in the I2P file-sharing environment. We allow I2P users to anonymously access public BitTorrent content and we obtain a fully anonymous file-sharing environment, including anonymous content indexation and anonymous content distribution. On the other hand, we focus on the understanding of anonymous environments through extensive monitoring. We characterise the I2P network, targeting the entire anonymous environment and its anonymous services. We consider different aspects of the network, such as the number of users, their characteristics as well as the number of anonymous services available. Through long-term measurements on the network and along with different correlation analyses, we are able to characterise a small group of users using a specific anonymous service, such as the users from a particular city performing anonymous file-sharing.