19 BitPredator: A Discovery Algorithm for BitTorrent Initial Seeders and Peers

There is a large amount of illegal content being replicated through peer-to-peer (P2P) networks where BitTorrent is dominant; therefore, a framework to profile and police it is needed. The goal of this work is to explore the behavior of initial seeds and highly active peers to develop techniques to correctly identify them. We intend to establish a new methodology and software framework for profiling BitTorrent peers. This involves three steps: crawling torrent indexers for keywords in recently added torrents using Really Simple Syndication protocol (RSS), querying torrent trackers for peer list data and verifying Internet Protocol (IP) addresses from peer lists. We verify IPs using active monitoring methods. Peer behavior is evaluated and modeled using bitfield message responses. We also design a tool to profile worldwide file distribution by mapping IP-to-geolocation and linking to WHOIS server information in Google Earth.