BitBlender: Light-Weight Anonymity for BitTorrent

The authors present BitBlender, an efficient protocol that provides an anonymity layer for BitTorrent traffic. BitBlender works by creating an ad-hoc multi-hop network consisting of special peers called "Relay Peers" that proxy requests and replies on behalf of other peers. To understand the effect of introducing relay peers into the BitTorrent system architecture, they provide an analysis of the expected path lengths as the ratio of relay peers to normal peers varies. A prototype is implemented and experiments are conducted on Planetlab to quantify the performance overhead associated with the protocol.