Persistent BitTorrent Trackers
Fran\c{c}ois-Xavier Wicht, Zhengwei Tong, Shunfan Zhou, Hang Yin, Aviv Yaish

TL;DR
This paper proposes a blockchain-based reputation system for private BitTorrent trackers, enhancing security, privacy, and resilience against tracker failures through cryptographic attestations and smart contracts.
Contribution
It introduces a novel reputation management scheme using smart contracts, cryptographic signatures, and privacy-preserving techniques to address weaknesses in existing private trackers.
Findings
Reputation can be migrated across tracker failures via smart contracts.
Transfer receipts incur less than 5% overhead with typical piece sizes.
Hybrid signature scheme reduces signing overhead by an order of magnitude.
Abstract
Private BitTorrent trackers enforce upload-to-download ratios to prevent free-riding, but suffer from three critical weaknesses: reputation cannot move between trackers, centralized servers create single points of failure, and upload statistics are self-reported and unverifiable. When a tracker shuts down, users lose their contribution history and cannot prove their standing to new communities. We address these problems by storing reputation in smart contracts and replacing self-reports with cryptographic attestations. Peers sign receipts for received pieces; the tracker aggregates them via BLS signatures and updates reputation. If a tracker is unavailable, peers fall back to an authenticated distributed hash table (DHT): stored reputation acts as a public key infrastructure (PKI), preserving access control without the tracker. Reputation is portable across tracker failures through…
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