Denial-of-service attacks and countermeasures on BitTorrent

BitTorrent has been widely used for the efficient distribution of files, such as digital content and media files, to very large numbers of users. However, previous work has exposed vulnerabilities in the protocol and demonstrated that they can be exploited to perform severe Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks against BitTorrent networks. Earlier, we proposed two novel algorithms as countermeasures to particularly effective attacks, mitigating the problem, and evaluated through simulation. The present paper reviews the attacks previously identified and the countermeasure algorithms, experimentally evaluating their operation through both simulation and experiments on live BitTorrent swarms. Both simulation and experimental results observed with the implementation of attacks and countermeasures indicate that the algorithms are effective in holding DoS attacks and efficient when attacks are not present.