BitTorrent is a popular p2p file replication application, which aims atreplicating a given content as fast as possible on a set of peers. Thealgorithms of BitTorrent used to elect remote peers with whom a peercollaborates and also which pieces of the content it offers, have provedto be highly efficient. This means that a high level of parallelism isachieved among the peers as a given peer always has a high chance tofind another peer that holds content it is currently missing. Still, atthe beginning of a BitTorrent session, pieces of the content have to beobtained from only a few peers (in general a single one called theinitial seed) that hold a full copy of the file to be replicated. Inthis work, we aim at evaluating the ability of a BitTorrent session tosurvive to a denial of service attack that would disconnect the initialseed from the network. We address this issue through experimentation. Our main conclusion is thatBitTorrent is highly resilient to this attack as neither the ability toobtain a full copy of the content nor the actual replication speed areaffected by the disconnection of the initial seed if the attack is notcarried out at the very early stage of the session.
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