Measurement Based Analysis of One-Click File Hosting Services

It is commonly believed that file sharing traffic on the Internet is mostly generated by peer-to-peer applications. However, we show that HTTP based file sharing services are also extremely popular. We analyzed the traffic of a large research and education network for three months, and observed that a large fraction of the inbound HTTP traffic corresponds to file download services, which indicates that an important portion of file sharing traffic is in the form of HTTP data. In particular, we found that two popular one-click file hosting services are among the top Internet domains in terms of served traffic volume. In this paper, we present an exhaustive study of the traffic generated by such services, the behavior of their users, the downloaded content, and their server infrastructure