A protocol based countermeasure to BitTorrent fake-block attack

As a well known Peer-to-Peer file sharing application, BitTorrent has been widely adopted for content dissemination in the internet. Like other P2P softwares, BitTorrent has the openness and anonymous characters that make it vulnerable to several serious security threats. This paper mainly focuses on one of the threats: fake-block pollution attack. We analyze the principle of Fake-block pollution attack and make a real world evaluation of its impact under the WAN. We find that fake-block pollution attack can significantly damage the dissemination services of target resource sharing swarm. This paper gives a novel countermeasure by modifying BitTorrent protocol to enhance the robustness of content integrity checking. The approach is backward and forward compatible. Finally, we evaluate our method through simulation experiments, the results indicate that our method is effective and feasible.