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| Autori principali: | , , , , |
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| Natura: | Preprint |
| Pubblicazione: |
2025
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| Accesso online: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.17260 |
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| _version_ | 1866908965508481024 |
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| author | Wicht, François-Xavier Tong, Zhengwei Zhou, Shunfan Yin, Hang Yaish, Aviv |
| author_facet | Wicht, François-Xavier Tong, Zhengwei Zhou, Shunfan Yin, Hang Yaish, Aviv |
| contents | Private BitTorrent trackers enforce upload-to-download ratios to prevent free-riding, but suffer from three critical weaknesses: reputation cannot move between trackers, centralized servers create single points of failure, and upload statistics are self-reported and unverifiable. When a tracker shuts down, users lose their contribution history and cannot prove their standing to new communities. We address these problems by storing reputation in smart contracts and replacing self-reports with cryptographic attestations. Peers sign receipts for received pieces; the tracker aggregates them via BLS signatures and updates reputation. If a tracker is unavailable, peers fall back to an authenticated distributed hash table (DHT): stored reputation acts as a public key infrastructure (PKI), preserving access control without the tracker. Reputation is portable across tracker failures through single-hop migration in factory-deployed contracts. We also address the privacy implications of publishing public keys and reputations tied to private trackers on a public ledger: we propose ephemeral session keys to prevent linking peer identities, zero-knowledge membership proofs for anonymous DHT participation, and confidential reputation using homomorphic commitments. We formalize the security requirements, prove four security properties under standard cryptographic assumptions, and evaluate a prototype. Measurements show that transfer receipts add less than 5\% end-to-end overhead with typical piece sizes. To minimize signing overhead, we adopt a hybrid signature scheme: ECDSA signs individual piece receipts at transfer time for low per-operation latency, while BLS serves as the overarching scheme, enabling compact aggregation of many receipts into a single proof at report time. This design reduces client-side signing cost by an order of magnitude compared to using BLS throughout. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_17260 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Persistent BitTorrent Trackers Wicht, François-Xavier Tong, Zhengwei Zhou, Shunfan Yin, Hang Yaish, Aviv Cryptography and Security Private BitTorrent trackers enforce upload-to-download ratios to prevent free-riding, but suffer from three critical weaknesses: reputation cannot move between trackers, centralized servers create single points of failure, and upload statistics are self-reported and unverifiable. When a tracker shuts down, users lose their contribution history and cannot prove their standing to new communities. We address these problems by storing reputation in smart contracts and replacing self-reports with cryptographic attestations. Peers sign receipts for received pieces; the tracker aggregates them via BLS signatures and updates reputation. If a tracker is unavailable, peers fall back to an authenticated distributed hash table (DHT): stored reputation acts as a public key infrastructure (PKI), preserving access control without the tracker. Reputation is portable across tracker failures through single-hop migration in factory-deployed contracts. We also address the privacy implications of publishing public keys and reputations tied to private trackers on a public ledger: we propose ephemeral session keys to prevent linking peer identities, zero-knowledge membership proofs for anonymous DHT participation, and confidential reputation using homomorphic commitments. We formalize the security requirements, prove four security properties under standard cryptographic assumptions, and evaluate a prototype. Measurements show that transfer receipts add less than 5\% end-to-end overhead with typical piece sizes. To minimize signing overhead, we adopt a hybrid signature scheme: ECDSA signs individual piece receipts at transfer time for low per-operation latency, while BLS serves as the overarching scheme, enabling compact aggregation of many receipts into a single proof at report time. This design reduces client-side signing cost by an order of magnitude compared to using BLS throughout. |
| title | Persistent BitTorrent Trackers |
| topic | Cryptography and Security |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.17260 |