We are writing to announce Cubit, a new open-source p2p overlay
that enables the Azureus BitTorrent client to look up torrents
via approximate keyword search.
As you may well be aware, BitTorrent is a completely decentralized
protocol for downloading content. With the later addition of the
"tracker-less" DHT to the BT protocol, users today can download a
torrent without having to rely on any centralized, hence vulnerable,
components.
However, the BitTorrent protocol does not address the issue of how to
find the torrent you want to download, and have to rely on websites,
such as piratebay, for looking up torrents. Since these lookups are
intrinsically "fuzzy" (i.e. the keywords may be partial and misspelled),
standard DHT techniques, which only support precise keyword lookup, are
not applicable. As a result, both legal and technical attacks have
targeted the torrent aggregators, most recently culminating in RIAA
temporarily shutting down piratebay.
Cubit completely decentralizes the lookup process through an efficient,
light-weight peer-to-peer overlay that can perform approximate matches.
It performs searches without relying on any centralized components, and
therefore is immune to legal and technical attacks targeting torrent
aggregators. Our implementation works as a plug-in for the popular
Azureus application -- Cubit provides an additional page from which you
can issue your searches and select the responses, all within a purely
peer-to-peer application.
For the technically oriented: the central insight behind Cubit is to
create a keyword metric space that captures the relative similarity of
keywords, to assign portions of this space to nodes in a light-weight
overlay and to resolve queries by efficiently routing them through this
space. The gritty technical details can be found on the papers and code
at our website.
The plugin and GPL source-files are available at:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/cubit/
Additional information about the system can be found at:
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~bwong/cubit/
Don't hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.
Best,
Bernard,
Alex,
Gun.
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