Attacks On and From P2P File-Sharing Systems
Many popular file-sharing systems have been the targets of massive attack. Furthermore, given the large number of peers in many file sharing systems, they can potentially be leveraged to create large-scale DDoS attacks against arbitrary targets. In this talk we examine attacks both on and from file sharing systems. For the attacks on, we examine two  attack types: index poisoning and pollution insertion. In the index poisoning attack, for a set of targeted titles, the attacker inserts massive numbers of bogus records into the index. As a result, when a user searches for a targeted title, the index returns bogus results, such as bogus file identifiers, bogus IP addresses, or bogus port numbers. In the pollution attack, the attacker inserts large volumes of polluted content into the system. We shall discuss both attacks in FastTrack, an unstructured P2P system, and Overnet, a DHT-based system which is part of eDonkey. We will also discuss how attackers can exploit a P2P file-sharing system to launch a DDoS attack against an arbitrary target host. In particular, we provide measurement results from our own mini-DDoS attacks exploiting Overnet.