[DMCA-Activists] New Scientist: P2P Rewiring May Fight Berman Bill

[Seth Johnson]

(Article text pasted below.  -- Seth)

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: NewScientist article  on P2P
Date: Tue, 12 Nov 2002 12:08:33 +0100
From: De Bug <address@hidden>
To: address@hidden


I found it on NewScientis site today:
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993037

The World's No.1 Science & Technology News Service

'Rewiring' file-sharing networks may stop attacks

10:51 11 November 02

< SNIP >

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De Bug

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> http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993037


'Rewiring' File-sharing Networks May Stop Attacks 
 
10:51 11 November 02

 
A proposed US law permitting attacks on peer-to-peer file
sharing networks to disrupt illegal copying could be
undermined by research from two US computer students.

Peer-to-peer networks let thousands of personal computers
communicate with each other so that users can search each
other's hard drives for files.

Some sections of the US entertainment industry are so
concerned about copyright infringement on peer-to-peer
networks that they are pushing for new powers to put a stop
to the activity themselves. The plans have outraged many
peer-to-peer network users and civil liberty campaigners.

A US bill proposed in July 2002 would give copyright holders
the legal power to attack the computers of file sharers
suspected of piracy. Experts say it would be relatively easy
to log on to a network and deliberately overload suspected
users with fake requests for a file, by misinforming other
"nodes". This is similar to overloading a web site with fake
traffic in a "denial of service" attack.

But Neil Daswani and Hector Garcia-Molina of the Database
Research Department at Stanford University in the US believe
it may be possible to redesign peer-to-peer networks to
protect them against such attacks. Daswani says this may
also guard these networks against malicious computer
hackers. He told New Scientist: "We were interested in both
protecting the network from being shut down and protecting
individual users."


Flood gates 

Daswani and Garcia-Molina mathematically modeled the popular
open source network Gnutella and experimented with different
combinations of existing rules for efficiently sharing file
requests across a network. This network consists of ordinary
users, or "nodes" and "supernodes", which have higher
bandwidth. Requests are broadcast between nodes and
supernodes with little discrimination.

Daswani points out that anyone can join a peer-to-peer
network, so it cannot be run on trust. Instead, the
researchers gave each node a set of simple rules to follow
when processing requests from other peers. They found that
when requests from ordinary nodes were treated in a
different way to requests from supernodes the damage caused
by a flooding attack was dramatically reduced. 

The optimum policy was to refuse second requests from a
specific supernode until all other connected supernodes had
also made a request - showing the request is more likely to
be genuine. Favouring requests from local supernodes was
also beneficial. A good overall arrangement was to have
peers communicating normally within small groups and
limiting communication between these groups.

By applying these rules, Daswani says, "you don't end up
using up all your bandwidth if there's a malicious node on
the network."


Peer review 

Theodore Hong, an expert in peer-to-peer networks at
Imperial College in the UK says: "They've developed a good
model for quantifying the damage caused by a query flood.
Using these policies, you can cut the damage caused by a
flood in half."

But Adam Langley, a UK-based peer-to-peer programmer and
contributor to Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of
Disruptive Technologies is not convinced that the system
would work in the real world. "I wonder about its
practicality," he told New Scientist, as the model assumes
an ideal, uniform network.

Organisations including the Recording Industry Association
of America  (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of
America (MPAA) are pushing for  better protection of
copyrighted music and movies. The P2P Piracy Prevention 
Act, proposed by Senator Howard Berman, is currently being
redrafted  following severe criticism and is not likely to
be introduced in any form  until January 2003 at the
earliest.