Free Riding on Gnutella

1
Free Riding on Gnutella

• Kenneth J. Garrow
• March 25, 2004
• Presentation F

2
Introduction

• Free Riding
• What is it?
• Social Dilemma
• Resulting problems
• Statistics
• Conclusion

3
What is it?

• Free Riding
• Users who dont produce (make files available)
  but only consume (download others files)
• Causes
• Users are not monitored
• Large user communities

4
Social Dilemma

• This free riding behavior is the result of a
  social dilemma that all users of such systems
  confront
• General Social Dilemma
• Group of people attempts to utilize a common good
  in the absence of central authority
• Gnutella Common Goods
• Provision of a very large library of files,
  music, documents, etc.
• Shared bandwidth in the system
• Gnutella Social Dilemma
• Contribute to the common good or free ride on the
  work of others

5
Resulting Problems

• Securing enough cooperation to be truly useful
• Degrade systems performance
• Creates vulnerabilities
• Only a few individual contribute (centralized
  servers)
• Lawsuits
• Denial of service attacks
• Loss of privacy

6
Statistics

• Significant amount of free riding on the system
• 70 of Gnutella users share no files
• 50 of all responses are returned from the top 1
  of sharing hosts
• Evenly distributed between domains
• No one group contributes significantly more than
  others
• Peers that volunteer to share files are not
  necessarily those who have desirable ones

7
Conclusion

• Serious implications for the future development
  of Gnutella
• For distributed systems with no central
  monitoring to succeed, a large amount of
  voluntary cooperation is required
• Difficult for systems with large user populations
  that remain anonymous

8
Questions?

• The End