Complex Networks

Working with the Amaral lab, we showed that BitTorrent users form stable communities that can be recovered from connection patterns alone — an observer learns what you are interested in without inspecting a single payload. SwarmScreen answers the attack by mixing a fraction of deliberately unrelated connections into a client’s behaviour, restoring plausible deniability.

BitTorrent users form communities that an observer can recover from connection patterns alone — an attacker monitoring 1% of the network could place users in their community of interest 86% of the time. SwarmScreen blurred that structure by adding random connections statistically indistinguishable from real ones, with a tuning knob for the privacy/performance trade-off.