“I Know Where You are and What You are Sharing”

Arnaud Legout will be presenting his work on exploiting p2p communications and user’s privacy at Fabelier, on June 20th at 7pm.

In this presentation, we show how to exploit real-time communication applications to determine the IP address of a targeted user. We focus our study on Skype, although other real-time communication applications may have similar privacy issues. We first design a scheme that calls an identified-targeted user inconspicuously to find his IP address, which can be done even if he is behind a NAT. By calling the user periodically, we can then observe the mobility of the user. We show how to scale the scheme to observe the mobility patterns of tens of thousands of users. We also consider the linkability threat, in which the identified user is linked to his Internet usage. We illustrate this threat by combining Skype and BitTorrent to show that it is possible to determine the filesharing usage of identified users. We devise a scheme based on the identification field of the IP datagrams to verify with high accuracy whether the identified user is participating in specific torrents. We conclude that any Internet user can leverage Skype, and potentially other real-time communication systems, to observe the mobility and filesharing usage of tens of millions of identified users.

Arnaud Legout is a researcher at INRIA in Planète team.

Planète conducts research in the domain of networking, with an emphasis on designing, implementing, and evaluating Internet protocols and applications. The main objective of the project-team is to propose and study new architectures, services and protocols that will enable efficient and secure communication through the Internet.

WHAT : https://fabelier.org/i-know-where-you-are-and/

WHERE : https://fabelier.org/where/

WHEN : https://fabelier.org/events-agenda/