BitThief 0.4

BitThief is an ongoing research project of the Distributed Computing Group at ETH Zurich. In this project we study selfish behavior in distributed systems, and in particular in peer-to-peer filesharing systems.

The lack of incentives to contribute resources potentially results in a total collapse of a peer-to-peer system, implying that it is essential for a completely decentralized system to incorporate protocols that ensure a fair sharing of resources. BitThief is a free riding BitTorrent client, that is, it downloads from BitTorrent swarms without contributing any resources itself. As such it proved that the BitTorrent protocol fails to prevent uncooperative behavior as it does not provide any countermeasures against free riding clients.