Deconstructing the Kazaa network

Abstract

Internet traffic is experiencing a shift from Web traffic to file swapping traffic. Today a significant part of Internet traffic is generated by peer-to-peer applications, mostly by the popular Kazaa application. Yet, to date, few studies analyze Kazaa traffic, thus leaving the bulk of Internet traffic in dark. We present a large-scale investigation of Kazaa traffic based on logs collected at a large Israeli ISP, which capture roughly a quarter of all traffic between Israel and US.