Data Sets of Paper "Dissecting Darknets: Measurement and Performance Analysis"

Private BitTorrent communicities (a.k.a. Dartknets)  have attraced a large populartion of users and generate huge Internet traffic. In order to understand the characteristics of Darknets, we conducted a measurement study during Sept 2009 - Feb 2011 on a set of 17 Darknets. Our measured datasets are publicly accessable to the reserach community.

Data collection methodology:

We developed a crawler to collect useful information from the websites of Darknets. Commonly available information include the number of torrents, the number of registered users, and the list of torrents. Some Darknets also release torrent-level information to members, such as the number of seeders, the number of leechers, seeder-to-leecher ratio (i.e., the ratio of the number of seeders to the number of leechers in a BT swarm), etc. A few Darknets also release user profile information, including each user’s download amount, upload amount, seeding time, and sharing ratio. More description about the dataset can be found at the readme.txt inside each zip file.

Table 1. List of our measured BitTorrent Communities and Related Information

Category

Name

# of Torrents

# of Users

Torrent-level Statistics

Torrent List

Trace Duration (mm/dd/yy)

BT Search Engine

ISOHunt

6,851,730

N/A

√

√

12/29/09 – 02/28/11

Public

General

ThePirateBay

3,697,031

4,939,460

√

(Part)

12/29/09 – 02/28/11

TorrentPortal

2,494,726

1,218,022

√

√

02/02/10 – 02/28/11

Private

 

General

Demonoid

355,299

N/A

N/A

√

01/17/10 – 02/28/11

ILoveTorrents

10,486

N/A

N/A

√

09/28/09 – 02/28/11

Scene Release

RevolutionTT

46,554

N/A

N/A

√

12/26/09 – 02/28/11

TorrentLeech

41,333

N/A

N/A

√

01/15/10 – 02/28/11

TorrentVault

40,032

15,000

√

√

03/02/10 – 02/28/11

DigitalHive

29,282

25,693

√

√

03/02/10 – 02/28/11

Bitsoup

14,604

N/A

N/A

√

10/16/09 – 02/28/11

High Definition

HDChina*

39,281

26,078

√

√

02/28/10 – 02/28/11

CHDBits*

33,450

31,350

√

√

09/28/09 – 02/28/11

HDStar*

17,561

23,045

√

√

10/05/09 – 02/28/11

HD-Torrents*

16,660

26,562

√

√

01/23/10 – 02/28/11

Foreign

RuTracker.org+

816,835

8,445,600

 √

N/A

10/01/09 – 02/28/11

Music

DimeaDozen

 40,814

114,998

√

√

02/02/10 – 02/28/11

TV

TheBox.bz

70,608

N/A

N/A

√

02/02/10 – 02/28/11

DVD

AsianDVDClub

37,252

35,408

√

√

02/02/10 – 02/28/11

e-Learning

ElBitz

12,789

N/A

N/A

√

03/16/10 – 02/28/11

Adult

PureTnA

66,893

631,015

√

√

02/02/10 – 01/01/11

Data updated until 00:00 EST, Feb 28, 2011, except for PureTnA (until Jan 1, 2011)

N/A indicates the community does not provide the corresponding data.

PureTnA was shut down in Jan 1, 2011.
DimeaDozen is the only community that provides the statistics of each torrent’s transfer speed in the Table.

* indicates the PTs use SRE mechanism with Credit/Point mechanism; 

+ indicates the PT uses Ratio Free mechanism, others use SRE mechanism.