IOTA-BT: A P2P File-Sharing System Based on IOTA

• Published in: Electronics (Basel) Vol. 9; no. 10; p. 1610
• Main Authors: Hou, Li-Yuan, Tang, Tsung-Yi, Liang, Tyng-Yeu
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 01.10.2020
• Subjects: Access control; Blockchain; Committees; Cryptography; Cybersecurity; Digital currencies; Eclipses; File sharing; Information retrieval; Internet of Things; Peer to peer computing; Seeders; Software
• ISSN: 2079-9292; 2079-9292
• DOI: 10.3390/electronics9101610

BitTorrent (BT) is the most popular peer-to-peer file-sharing system. According to official BT information, more than 100 million active users use BT for file transfers every month. However, BT mainly relies on either a central tracker (tracker) or distributed hash table (DHT) for locating file seeders while it runs a risk of a single point of failure or cyber-attacks such as Sybil and Eclipses. To attack this problem, we proposed a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file-sharing system called IOTA-BT by integrating BitTorrent with IOTA in this paper. The advantages of IOTA over blockchain include scalability for high throughput, compatibility with Internet of Things (IoT) footprints, zero transaction fees, partition-tolerant, and quantum-resistant cryptography. The autopeering and neighbor selection of the Coordicide of IOTA is aimed at defending a Sybil or Eclipse attack. IOTA-BT inherits these advantages from IOTA. Moreover, our experimental results have shown that the cost of executing BT functions, such as releasing torrent files and retrieving seeder information on IOTA-BT, is acceptable for improving the security of BT. IOTA-BT can indeed efficiently provide users with a P2P file-sharing environment of higher security.