CSE Seminars/Conferences

Colloquia, Seminars and Conference News

Title : Attacks in P2P File Sharing Systems

Date : November 9, 2005. (1:00 pm) Tea starts half an hour before each seminar

Location: ITEB 336

Speaker : Keith Ross

Abstract:

Today many popular file-sharing systems are under attack. We shall discuss two popular attack types: index poisoning and pollution insertion. P2P file-sharing systems have distributed indexes, which users search to find locations of desired titles. In the index poisoning attack, the attacker inserts massive numbers of bogus records into the index for a set of targeted titles. 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, and examine the consequences of the attacks in FastTrack, an unstructured P2P system, and Overnet, a DHT-based system. We will also discuss how attackers can exploit a P2P file-sharing system to launch a DDoS attack against an arbitrary target host.

Bio:

Professor Ross joined Polytechnic University as the Leonard J. Shustek Professor in Computer Science in January 2003. Before joining Polytechnic University, he was previously a professor at the Eurecom in France and at the University of Pennsylvania.

Professor Ross has worked in peer-to-peer networking, stochastic modeling, video streaming, multi-service loss networks, content distribution networks, voice over IP, optimization, queuing theory, optimal control of queues, and Markov decision processes. He is currently associate editor for IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking and has served on numerous journal editorial boards and conference program committees.

Professor Ross is co-author (with James F. Kurose) of the popular textbook, Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach Featuring the Internet, published by Addison-Wesley (preliminary edition in 1999, first edition in 2000, second edition in 2002, third edition 2004). The text is used by over 200 US universities each academic year, is widely used internationally, and has been translated into ten languages. Professor Ross is also the author of the research monograph, Multiservice Loss Models for Broadband Communication Networks, published by Springer in 1995.

From July 1999 to July 2001, Professor Ross took a leave of absence to found and lead Wimba, an Internet startup that develops VoIP products for eLearning applications.

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Computer Science & Engineering Department 371 Fairfield Road Unit 2155 Storrs, CT 06269-2155 Phone: (860) 486-3719 Fax: (860) 486-4817	Colloquia, Seminars and Conference News Title : Attacks in P2P File Sharing Systems Date : November 9, 2005. (1:00 pm) Tea starts half an hour before each seminar Location: ITEB 336 Speaker : Keith Ross Abstract: Today many popular file-sharing systems are under attack. We shall discuss two popular attack types: index poisoning and pollution insertion. P2P file-sharing systems have distributed indexes, which users search to find locations of desired titles. In the index poisoning attack, the attacker inserts massive numbers of bogus records into the index for a set of targeted titles. 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, and examine the consequences of the attacks in FastTrack, an unstructured P2P system, and Overnet, a DHT-based system. We will also discuss how attackers can exploit a P2P file-sharing system to launch a DDoS attack against an arbitrary target host. Bio: Professor Ross joined Polytechnic University as the Leonard J. Shustek Professor in Computer Science in January 2003. Before joining Polytechnic University, he was previously a professor at the Eurecom in France and at the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Ross has worked in peer-to-peer networking, stochastic modeling, video streaming, multi-service loss networks, content distribution networks, voice over IP, optimization, queuing theory, optimal control of queues, and Markov decision processes. He is currently associate editor for IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking and has served on numerous journal editorial boards and conference program committees. Professor Ross is co-author (with James F. Kurose) of the popular textbook, Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach Featuring the Internet, published by Addison-Wesley (preliminary edition in 1999, first edition in 2000, second edition in 2002, third edition 2004). The text is used by over 200 US universities each academic year, is widely used internationally, and has been translated into ten languages. Professor Ross is also the author of the research monograph, Multiservice Loss Models for Broadband Communication Networks, published by Springer in 1995. From July 1999 to July 2001, Professor Ross took a leave of absence to found and lead Wimba, an Internet startup that develops VoIP products for eLearning applications. [Back] Print \| Email