Torrent Forensics: Are your Files Being Shared in the BitTorrent Network?

—BitTorrent is the most common protocol for file sharing nowadays. Due to its distributed nature, monitoring BitTorrent is a difficult task. Under this perception of anonymity, BitTorrent has motivated the rise of criminal activities such as copyright infringement or the sharing of stolen secret documents. This work-in progress paper focuses on identifying whether a given resource has been shared in the BitTorrent network. We have termed this problem torrent forensics. We propose a methodology to solve this problem as well as the design of an operational system to implement the solution. The system is run in two different phases. First, we monitor the network and collect .torrent files that describe the resources being shared. Second, a detection module analyzes a given resource and decides if it was observed in the network. We carry out preliminary experiments to support the hypotheses for the design of the system