Why are they hiding? Study of an anonymous file sharing system

This paper characterizes a recently proposed anonymous file sharing system, OneSwarm. This characterisation is based on measurement of several aspects of the OneSwarm system such as the nature of the shared and searched content and the geolocation and number of users. Our findings indicate that, as opposed to common belief, there is no significant difference in downloaded content between this system and the classical BitTorrent ecosystem. We also found that a majority of users appears to be located in countries where anti-piracy laws have been recently adopted and enforced (France, Sweden and U.S). Finally, we evaluate the level of privacy provided by OneSwarm, and show that, although the system has strong overall privacy, a collusion attack could potentially identify content providers.