# I Know Where You are and What You are Sharing: Exploiting P2P Communications to Invade Users' Privacy

Stevens Le Blond, Chao Zhang, Arnaud Legout, Keith W. Ross, Walid Dabbous

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Stevens Le Blond, Chao Zhang, Arnaud Legout, Keith W. Ross, Walid Dabbous. I Know Where You are and What You are Sharing: Exploiting P2P Communications to Invade Users' Privacy. IMC'2011, Nov 2011, Berlin, Germany. inria-00632780

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# I Know Where You are and What You are Sharing:
## Exploiting P2P Communications to Invade Users' Privacy

Stevens Le Blond* Chao Zhang† Arnaud Legout‡ Keith Ross† Walid Dabbous‡

* MPI-SWS, Germany † NYU-Poly, USA ‡ INRIA, France

## ABSTRACT

In this paper, we show how to exploit real-time communication applications to determine the IP address of a targeted user. We focus our study on Skype, although other real-time communication applications may have similar privacy issues. We first design a scheme that calls an identified-targeted user inconspicuously to find his IP address, which can be done even if he is behind a NAT. By calling the user periodically, we can then observe the mobility of the user. We show how to scale the scheme to observe the mobility patterns of tens of thousands of users. We also consider the linkability threat, in which the identified user is linked to his Internet usage. We illustrate this threat by combining Skype and BitTorrent to show that it is possible to determine the filesharing usage of identified users. We devise a scheme based on the identification field of the IP datagrams to verify with high accuracy whether the identified user is participating in specific torrents. We conclude that any Internet user can leverage Skype, and potentially other real-time communication systems, to observe the mobility and filesharing usage of tens of millions of identified users.

## 1. INTRODUCTION

The cellular service providers are capable of tracking and logging our whereabouts as long as our cell phones are powered on. Because the web sites we visit see our source IP addresses and cookies, the web sites we frequently visit – such as Google [5] and Facebook [4] – can also track our whereabouts to some extent. Although tracking our whereabouts can be considered a major infringement on our privacy, most people are not terribly concerned, largely because they trust that the cellular and major Internet application providers will not disclose this information. Moreover, these large companies have privacy policies, in which they assure their users that they will not make location history, and other personal information, publicly available.

In this paper, we are not concerned about whether large brand-name companies can track our mobility, but instead about whether smaller less-trustworthy entities

<table><caption>Table 1: Number of users claimed by Skype [11], MSN Live [9], QQ [10], and Google Talk [8] and for each of these systems, whether it has a directory service and employs P2P communications.</caption><thead><tr><th>App</th><th># Users</th><th>Dir</th><th>P2P</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Skype</td><td>560M</td><td>✓</td><td>✓</td></tr><tr><td>MSN Live</td><td>550M</td><td>✗</td><td>✓</td></tr><tr><td>QQ</td><td>500M</td><td>✓</td><td>✓</td></tr><tr><td>Google Talk</td><td>150M</td><td>✗</td><td>✓</td></tr></tbody></table>

can leverage the Internet to periodically track our whereabouts. Is it possible, for example, for an ordinary user with modest financial resources, operating from his or her home, to periodically determine the IP address of a targeted and identified Internet user and to link it to this user's Internet activities (e.g., file sharing)? We will show that the answer to this question is yes!

Real-time communication (e.g., VoIP and Video-over-IP) is enormously popular in the Internet today. As shown in Table 1, the applications Skype, QQ, MSN Live, and Google Talk together have more than 1.6 billion registered users.

Real-time communication in the Internet is naturally done peer-to-peer (P2P), i.e., datagrams flow directly between the two conversing users. The P2P nature of such a service, however, exposes the IP addresses of all the participants in a conversation to each other. Specifically, if Alice knows Bob's VoIP ID, she can establish a call with Bob and obtain his current IP address by simply sniffing the datagrams arriving to her computer. She can also use geo-localization services to map Bob's IP address to a location and ISP. If Bob is mobile, she can call him periodically to observe his mobility over, say, a week or month. Furthermore, once she knows Bob's IP address, she can crawl P2P file-sharing systems to see if that IP address is uploading/downloading any files. Thus VoIP can potentially be used to collect a targeted user's location. And VoIP can potentially be combined with P2P file sharing to determine what a user is uploading/downloading. This would clearly be a serious infringement on privacy.

<footnote>*The first author contributed to this work while a Ph.D. student at INRIA.</footnote>
However, for such a scheme to be effective, there are
several technical challenges:

* For a specific targeted individual – such as Bob Smith, 28 years old, living in Kaiserslautern Germany – can Alice determine with certainty his VoIP ID?

* Can Alice determine which packets come from Bob (and thereby obtain his IP address)? Indeed, during call setup, Alice may receive packets from many other peers. In addition, can Alice call Bob inconspicuously, so that Alice can periodically call Bob and get his IP address without Bob knowing it? Finally, can Alice obtain Bob's address, even when Bob configures his VoIP client to block calls from Alice?

* If Bob's IP address, found with VoIP, is the same as an IP address found in a P2P file-sharing system, then we cannot conclude with certainty that Bob is downloading the corresponding file, since Bob may be behind a NAT (with the matching IP address being the public IP address of the NAT). Thus, is it possible to verify that Bob is indeed uploading/downloading the files, given that NATs are widely deployed in the Internet?

In this paper, using Skype, we develop a measurement
scheme to meet all the above challenges. (This may
be possible with other VoIP systems as well, which we
leave for future work.) Our main contributions are the
following:

* *We develop a scheme to find a targeted person's Skype ID and to inconspicuously call this person to find his IP address, even if he is behind a NAT.* By carefully studying Skype packet patterns for a Skype caller, we are able to distinguish packets received from the Skype callee from packets received from many other peers. Having identified these packets, we extract the callee's IP address from the headers of the packets. Furthermore, through experimentation, we determine how to obtain the IP address of the callee fully inconspicuously, that is, without ringing or notifying the user. Finally, we show that Skype privacy settings fail to protect against our scheme.

* *We show our scheme can be used periodically to observe the mobility of Skype users.* By scaling our scheme, we demonstrate that Skype does not implement counter measures to hinder such schemes. Although there are several challenges to measure the mobility of a large number of users, we show that it can be done efficiently and effectively.

* *We show that the scheme introduces a linkability threat where the identity of a person can be associated to his Internet usage.* We illustrate this threat by combining Skype and BitTorrent to show that it is possible to determine the file-sharing usage of identified users. One of the challenges here is that a BitTorrent user is often NATed, so that he may share his IP address with many other users. When a common IP address is discovered in both Skype and BitTorrent, we immediately launch a verification procedure in which we simultaneously call the corresponding user and perform a BitTorrent handshake to the IP address, port and infohash (which identifies the file being shared). We then use the identification field of the IP datagrams to verify with high accuracy whether an identified user is participating in specific torrents. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first ones to show that such a scheme can be used in the wild.

In addition to the technical contributions of this pa-
per, another contribution is that we are alerting Inter-
net users (and the Skype company as discussed in the
next section) of a major privacy vulnerability, whereby
targeted users can have their mobility and Internet us-
age tracked. As of May 2011 (more than six months af-
ter having notified the Skype company), all the schemes
presented in this paper are still valid. We provide
some relatively simple solutions so that future real-time
communication systems can be made less vulnerable to
these attacks.

One solution that would go a long way is to design
the VoIP system so that the callee's IP address is not
revealed until the user accepts the call. With this prop-
erty, Alice would not be able to inconspicuously call
Bob. Moreover, if Alice is a stranger (that is, not on
Bob's contact list), and Bob configures his client to not
accept calls from strangers, then this design would pre-
vent any stranger from tracking him, conspicuously or
otherwise. However, even with this solution in place,
any friend of Bob, say Susan, can still call him conspic-
uously and obtain his IP address. Susan could be Bob's
spouse, parent, employer, or employee, for example. It
would be hard for Susan to periodically track Bob this
way, but Susan could still (i) get Bob's current loca-
tion, and (ii) check to see if Bob is downloading content
from a P2P file-sharing system. Preventing these at-
tacks would require more fundamental changes in the
VoIP system (specifically, using relays by default) or
more fundamental changes in the underlying Internet
protocols.

This paper is organized as follows. We discuss the le-
gal and ethical considerations of this paper in Section 2.
In Section 3, we describe our scheme to determine the
current IP address of a person using Skype. We then
show that this scheme can be used periodically to ob-
serve the mobility and file-sharing usage of identified
users in Section 4 and 5. Finally, we discuss some sim-
ple defenses in Section 6, the related work in Section 7,
and we conclude in Section 8.

## 2. LEGAL AND ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS

In this measurement study, all testing involving iden-
tified users has been performed on a small sample of
volunteers who gave us their informed consent to make
measurements and publish results. Unfortunately, the
informed consent process for privacy, as for fraud [25],
may significantly bias user behavior. For example, in-
formed users may stop using Skype or BitTorrent. For
this reason, we also needed to consider a larger sample
of (anonymized) users in order to accurately assess the
amount of personal information that is revealed by a
normal usage, e.g., the mobility and file-sharing usage
of Skype users. For the sake of privacy, we only stored
and processed anonymized mobility and file-sharing in-
formation.

Based on these arguments, the INRIA IRB approved
this study. In the following, we describe our motivation
to run privacy measurements, the tests that we ran with
volunteers, and the remaining measurements.

Motivation for Running Privacy Measurements.

Internet users publish a lot of personal information that can be exploited in non-trivial ways to invade their privacy. Indeed, recent research demonstrates that personal information can be correlated in ways that would have been hard to anticipate [32]. One goal of this study is to show that any Internet user can leverage popular real-time communication applications to observe the mobility patterns and file-sharing usage of tens of millions of Internet users. It is important to give public visibility to these privacy issues, as they constitute serious invasions into users' privacy, and can potentially be used for blackmail and phishing attacks.

Volunteers.

In this study, we have relied on two sets of volunteers
for which we have obtained informed consent. The first
set comprises 14 research faculty in the CSE department
at NYU-Poly for which we have attempted to find the
Skype IDs.

The second set comprises 20 people spread through-
out the world (4 in Asia, 2 in Australia, 7 in Europe,
and 7 in USA) in cable and DSL ISPs, with 10 users
directly connectable and 10 users behind NAT. We de-
liberately chose users located in different continents and
with different Internet connectivity to observe a large
diversity of user and client behaviors. We have relied
on the second set of volunteers to (i) determine Skype
packet patterns between caller and callee, (ii) develop

and test inconspicuous calling, and (iii) evaluate the ac-
curacy of mobility measurements. After manual testing,
we called each volunteer 100 times and systematically
observed one of the three packet patterns described in
Section 3 between caller and callee. We also observed
that our inconspicuous calling procedure never notified
them about the calls in any way.

Anonymized users.

We relied on two samples of users for which we did
not store their personal information in this study. We
first used a sample of 10,000 random users to quantify
their mobility. We then used a second sample of 100,000
random users that we used to illustrate a linkability
threat, where the identity of a person can be associated
to his Internet usage (e.g., file sharing).

We always collected the IP addresses of the
anonymized users using inconspicuous calls, which we
validated on the volunteers. Therefore, no human con-
tact was ever made with any of the anonymized users.
Moreover, we processed and stored only anonymized in-
formation, e.g., we anonymized all localization informa-
tion, downloaded content, and we did not store the IP
addresses. Details of all anonymized information are
given in Section 4 and 5.

Other considerations.

In order to conform to the responsible disclosure pro-
cess, we informed the Skype company of our conclusions
in November 2010. In addition, we did not perform any
reverse engineering on Skype binaries. Finally, our mea-
surements generated at most 2.7 calls per second and a
few kilobytes of bandwidth per second, so the load that
we created on the Skype infrastructure was marginal.

3. MAPPING A PERSON TO AN IP ADDRESS

In the following, we first describe how to find a tar-
geted person's Skype ID, that is a unique user ID of a
person in Skype. Then, we present our scheme to find,
based on a Skype ID, the IP address used by this per-
son. We explain how to make this scheme inconspicuous
for the user, and we show that the privacy settings in
Skype fail to protect against our scheme.

3.1 Finding a Person's ID

When creating a Skype account, a user needs to pro-
vide an e-mail address and Skype ID. The user is also
invited to provide personal information, such as birth
name, location, gender, age, and/or website. This infor-
mation is recorded in the Skype directory. Therefore, in
attempting to define a person's Skype ID, the obvious
first step is to input into the directory's search service
the person's e-mail address or birth name.

When searching for a birth name, Skype will often
return many results. Along with these results, there is often side information, such as city and country of residence. As we will discuss below, if there is still ambiguity about which Skype ID corresponds to the targeted person, we can, using the methodology described in the following section, inconspicuously call each of the candidate Skype IDs, obtain a current or recent IP address for each of those IDs, and from the IP addresses determine current city and ISP (which might be a University or an employer ISP). Such a procedure often determines a person's Skype ID without ambiguity. We briefly remark that if this search was instead based on a service that doesn't provide a directory (such as MSN Live or Google Talk), one may still be able to determine the ID by scraping homepages, scraping pages from various social networks, or simply by guessing.

To illustrate that one can easily find the Skype IDs for a set of identified individuals, we attempt to find the IDs of the 14 research faculty in the CSE department at NYU-Poly, all of whom gave us their informed consent. By searching the corresponding 14 professional e-mail addresses, we found 2 Skype IDs and by searching the corresponding 14 birth names, we found 7 additional IDs with a single match. Among the 5 people for which we did not find a conclusive Skype ID, there was multiple matching IDs for 4 and no matching Skype ID only for 1. For the professors with multiple candidate IDs, it would have been possible to inconspicuously call each of the candidate IDs (as described below), geo-localize each candidate, and most likely pinpoint the correct ID. In summary, among 14 NYU-Poly faculty members, we found the Skype IDs for nine of them, and we could have very possibly determined the IDs for four more.

## 3.2 Finding a Person's IP Address

We have seen how to find the Skype ID of a targeted person. We now discuss how, given the person's Skype ID, we can find the IP address of the machine on which that person is currently active. (If the machine is behind a NAT, then we instead obtain the public IP address of the NAT.) The basic idea is to call the Skype ID, receive IP datagrams from the machine on which that ID is currently logged in, and sniff the packets to get the machine's IP address from the IP header. We describe in the following when this IP address is available.

When the caller calls a Skype user who is currently off-line, the Skype application will still provide to the caller the user's most recent IP address, as long as the user was running Skype in the past 72 hours. For this reason, we are able to retrieve the IP address of a Skype user that used Skype within the past 72 hours.

By examining traffic patterns to and from a Skype client when our client makes a call to a Skype ID that has been active in the past 72 hours, we have observed

that Skype behaves as follows. At the time of the call, the user may be in one of three possible states (i) the user is online and not behind a NAT; (ii) the user is online and behind a NAT; (iii) the user is offline, but was online (with or without a NAT) within the past 72 hours. (There is also the possibility that the user is logged in at more than one address simultaneously. We will discuss that case subsequently.) For case (i), when the user (callee) is online and not behind a NAT, the caller will initiate communication with the callee, sending packets directly to the callee (with the callee's IP address in the destination address field of the datagrams). For case (ii), when the callee is online but behind a NAT, the callee will be instructed (via the callee's supernode) to initiate communication to the caller. In this case, the callee's public IP address will be in the source address field of the incoming datagrams. For case (iii), when the targeted user is offline (but was online in the past 72 hours), the caller's Skype client will still attempt to call the targeted user, using the IP address that was most recently observed by Skype in the past 72 hours. (If the targeted user is behind a NAT, the caller will try to initiate a call, using the public IP address of the NATed user.) In this last case, the callee's most recent (public) IP address can be determined from the IP datagrams. Thus, the callee's IP address (current or most recent) can be extracted from the source and destination fields of IP datagrams.

However, there is a major complication here. In the process of establishing a call, the call triggers communication with tens of IP addresses (supernodes and relays). As supernodes and relays are hosted by Skype users, their IP addresses belong to a multitude of address ranges that we cannot just filter out. So it is complex to determine which Skype datagrams are for direct communication with the callee. As Skype uses a proprietary protocol and encrypts the payloads of its messages, we cannot perform direct packet inspection to find packets originating from the callee. To solve this problem, we designed a scheme that relies solely on the packet patterns between the caller and the various Skype nodes it is communicating with.

To understand Skype's traffic, we placed calls to the second set of volunteers for which we knew the IP addresses of (see Section 2). We observed three identifiable patterns of communication that take place between the caller and callee during the call establishment phase. By exploiting these patterns, we were able to filter out the noise, such as communication with supernodes. Fig. 1 shows these three patterns.

We observe the first pattern when the callee is online and public (case (i)). In that case, the caller will try to initiate the TCP connection by sending a SYN packet. We will see in Section 3.3, that we need to drop SYN packets to make inconspicuous calls. When the TCP
<figure><img src="image_2.png" /><figcaption>Figure 1: Communication pattern: (i) callee is online and public; (ii) callee online and behind a NAT; (iii) callee is offline. Crosses correspond to SYN packets that we dropped in order to call inconspicuously.</figcaption></figure>

timeout occurs, the caller retransmits the SYN, making two tries after the initial attempt before giving up. The first timeout interval is 3 seconds and the second is 1 second. In addition to the TCP packets, there are UDP packets between the caller and the callee. We always observe three 59 byte or 58 byte packets from caller to callee, and the intervals between them are 2 seconds and 4 seconds. Thus, between caller and callee there is a specific traffic pattern, which is shown in Fig. 1 (i). There is also communication between caller and supernodes; however, the communication with non-callees does not exhibit the pattern in Fig. 1 (i). In summary, by identifying the IP address that has packets with the pattern in Fig. 1 (i), we identify the IP address of the callee. We remark that the TCP packets and UDP packets don't always appear sequentially. Most of the time, they are mixed.

The second pattern is observed when the callee is online but behind a NAT (case (ii)), that is, the caller cannot initiate communication with the callee. In that case, we have observed that the callee will send a 28 byte UDP packet to the caller. The caller replies with the same size UDP packet. Next, the caller and callee will exchange UDP packets of varying sizes. After about 10 seconds, the callee sends 3 byte UDP packets to the caller. We do not observe these 3 byte UDP packets from any other source besides the callee. The pattern is shown in Fig. 1 (ii).

The last pattern occurs when the callee is offline but has been online in the past 72 hours. In that case, the caller still attempts to call the user at its last-seen IP address. The pattern is shown in Fig. 1 (iii). Note this pattern has the same structure as that of case (i) except now there is no response from the callee, since it is offline.

To make things even more complicated, a Skype ID can be simultaneously online at more than one machine. In this case, for each online machine either the pattern

in Fig. 1 (i) or (ii) will occur once for each online machine. We developed a script that searches for the various patterns and identifies the callee's IP address(es).

## 3.3 Inconspicuous calling

In the following, we define the tracking client as the Skype client we use to exchange packets with a callee. The tracking client is an actual Skype client controlled by a script via the Skype API. Importantly, each of the tracking client is not behind a NAT and, therefore, has a public IP address. Therefore, communication between each tracking client and any user (NATed or not) will always be P2P rather than relayed.

Whenever a Skype call comes in, it is accompanied with a ring and a pop-up window for notification. The callee then chooses to accept, reject, or ignore the call. (We use the terminology “user” and “callee” interchangeably, depending on context.) Since the tracking client actually makes calls to callees, if not designed carefully, it will cause ringing and pop ups on the callees’ machines. Not only would this disturb the callee, but it would expose the attacker. We therefore need to design our scheme so the tracking client exchanges packets directly with the callee – *without notifying the callee of the call*.

In our testing, we have observed that during call establishment, both TCP and UDP packets are sent between the tracking client and the callee. We have found that if we prevent TCP connections from being established with the callee, the callee will not be notified about the call. Thus, a possible simple solution is to have the tracking client drop all TCP SYN packets sent to and from the callee. However, at the time when we make the call, we have no clue about the callee's IP address, and we cannot tell whether an observed TCP SYN is going to (or coming from) a Skype infrastructure node, a supernode, a relay node, or the targeted callee.

To solve this problem, during each call, we prevent the establishment of any new TCP connection by dropping all outgoing and incoming SYN packets (to all IP addresses). Note this procedure does not terminate the tracking client's TCP connections that were in progress before making the call (for example, an ongoing connection to a supernode). With this simple mechanism, the callee is never notified, even if the callee is behind a NAT. To check that no pop ups appear, we tested this scheme on the volunteers as described in Section 2.

## 3.4 Skype Privacy Settings

Skype has two privacy settings to block calls from specific people. The first setting, *allows call from people in my Contact list only*, is a white list. The second setting called *blocked people* is a black list blocking all people whose Skype ID is in this list.
We tested the impact of both settings on our scheme to inconspicuously get the IP address of a callee. For the first setting, the caller was not in the contact list of the callee. For the second setting, the callee explicitly blocked the Skype ID of the caller. In both cases, we were able to inconspicuously retrieve the IP address of the callee. *In summary, we observed that Skype privacy settings fail to protect against our scheme.*

# 4. MOBILITY OF SKYPE USERS

In the previous section, we presented a scheme to map a person's name to an IP address. We now investigate whether our scheme can be used to periodically observe the mobility patterns of large sets of Internet users.

## 4.1 Mobility of a Volunteer

### 4.1.1 Geo-Localize Skype Users

In the following, we use MaxMind [6] to geo-localize the IP addresses that are obtained from the tracking client, hence providing us with the location of users. MaxMind is a service that, given an IP address, provides a city, country, and AS. To determine city and country, it first aggregates known IP locations from websites that ask their users to provide their geographic location. Then, it uses various heuristics to interpolate the location of other IP addresses. MaxMind claims that it achieves 99.8% accuracy at the country level and 83% on a city level for the US within a radius of 25 miles.

Apart from our set of volunteers, for the sake of user privacy, we anonymized (using a salted hash) all location information. Therefore, we can tell when users change locations at the city, AS or country scale, but not where they actually are.

### 4.1.2 Example

To give a concrete idea of the kind of mobility that can be observed, we plot in Fig. 2 the mobility of a user in our second set of volunteers. (This volunteer has seen the paper and has given us his consent for all the information about him disclosed.) This person makes publicly available his birth name, gender, date of birth, language, and city of residence in Skype. By searching his birth name and city on Facebook and LinkedIn, we are able to determine his profession and employer.

We now briefly describe the mobility of this user. He confirmed to us that during our measurement period he was first visiting a university in New York; he then took a vacation in Chicago; then returned to university and lodged in Brooklyn; and finally returned to his home in France. Fig. 2 gives an accurate description of the real mobility of this user during the measurement period. The Manhattan location corresponds to an Internet cafe (confirmed by the user).

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Figure 2: Example of mobility of a volunteer.</figcaption></figure>

We remark that if we had followed the mobility of the Facebook friends of this user as well, we likely would have determined who he was visiting and when. In conclusion, mobility combined with information from social networks can provide a vivid picture of the daily activities of a targeted user. It is, in our opinion, a major privacy concern for users of real-time communication systems.

Whereas this volunteer has an active mobility pattern well suited for our illustrative purpose, a legitimate question is whether it is possible to observe mobility for any Skype user. We answer this question in the following.

## 4.2 Mobility of the Anonymized Users

We now describe how to scale our scheme to measure the availability and mobility of a representative sample of anonymized Skype users. To confirm the frequent mobility of Skype users, these users indeed need to be often running Skype and from several locations. In addition, we are also interested in evaluating the cost of scaling our scheme and in examining whether Skype employs counter measures to hinder it.

For the sake of privacy, we anonymized (as described in section 4.1.1) all location information, and we do not store IP addresses. Therefore, we can only report aggregated statistics, and not detailed user location information.

### 4.2.1 Obtaining Millions of Skype IDs

In the following, we show that one can easily retrieve a large number of Skype IDs along with the personal information associated with these IDs. To this end, we use the Skype API to collect the IDs. For each ID, we check whether the birth name and other personal information is available. We do not store this information,
but instead just note whether it is available in the Skype user's profile.

The Skype public API provides a mechanism for third party applications to control a Skype client. This API operates as follows. After registering with the Skype client, the application can send to the client plain text commands such as *search* and *call*. The Skype client then returns plain text messages to the application. In particular, the Skype API has a *search users* command that takes a search string as a parameter and returns a list of users whose ID, birth name, or e-mail address matches the string. If the search string contains `@`, the search is performed by e-mail address and has to be an exact match. If the search string is a valid Skype ID, the search is performed on the birth name and ID. Otherwise, the search is made on the birth name only. In addition to the Skype ID of a user, this command will return any other personal information that the user provided at registration, such as birth name, age, gender, homepage, country, language, and other identifying information.

To build our search strings, we use a set of 580K birth names that we collected on Facebook using a similar technique as the one described by Tang et al. [29]. This set is made up of 66K first names and 156K last names. We then combine the birth names, first names, and last names, to obtain 802K unique search strings. For each of these search strings, we send the *search users* command, which typically returns a long list of users, some of whom didn't specify birth names. We then aggregated these lists together and obtained 13M Skype IDs together with which identifying information was available in the profile. For these 13M Skype IDs, 88% provide their birth names and 82% provide either age, gender, homepage, country or language identifying information (we only store a binary information indicating whether a user has provided a given personal information). We note that even though we used Facebook to build our search strings, we could use any database of first and last names.

### 4.2.2 Parallel Calling

From the Skype IDs obtained in the previous section, we select 100,000 Skype IDs at random. From these 100,000 IDs, we then determine (using the techniques discussed in Section 3) that 10,000 Skype IDs (10%) have been active in the past 72 hours. Finally, we call these 10,000 Skype IDs on an hourly basis. From this result based on a random sample of 100,000 Skype users, we can extrapolate that we can retrieve the IP address of approximately 10% of all Skype users at any time, which represents 56 million of users at any moment in time. We now describe the methodology to call the 10,000 Skype IDs.

We deploy several tracking clients in parallel, each

of which calls a subset of the 10,000 Skype IDs. The tracking client calls sequentially all the Skype IDs in its subset, and then repeats the procedure every hour. We determine the IP address of each called Skype ID using the inconspicuous call methodology described in Section 3.3. Based on this IP address we compute the anonymized location of the user as described in section 4.1.1.

Scaling our scheme is challenging. To be able to call 10,000 users on an hourly basis, we need to deploy many tracking clients in parallel, with each one sequentially making one call after another. In order to keep the number of parallel tracking clients to a reasonable level, the time $s$ between two successive calls for a given client should be short.

Indeed, there is an important tradeoff in considering an appropriate value for $s$. Consider that the tracking client calls one user, waits $s$ seconds, terminates the call, and then repeats the process with another user. If $s$ is large, our tracking client will call users at a relatively low rate. If $s$ is too small, we may terminate the call before the packet pattern is initiated, in which case we may incorrectly assign the IP address of the subsequent Skype ID to the current Skype ID. Thus, special care must be taken to associate the IP addresses with the correct Skype IDs.

The simplest approach is, before making the subsequent call, to wait long enough so that the complete packet pattern elapses. Normally, this takes about 15 seconds from when the first packet is observed until the whole packet pattern occurs. But if we wait 15 seconds between each call, only 4 Skype IDs per minute can be probed.

To increase the calling rate, we performed further tests and observed that (a) once a packet pattern starts, it completes even if the call is terminated before completion; (b) all packet patterns begin within three seconds after making the call. Based on these observations, by waiting three seconds before calling a new Skype ID, we always see the pattern beginning before the end of the three second interval, and also see the pattern complete (extending beyond the 3 seconds). To verify claim (a), we randomly pick 500 users from our Skype ID pool, and call them using two different values of $s$: 3 seconds and 20 seconds. After comparing the mappings generated from the two approaches, we observe that they are identical for all 500 random Skype users. This implies that the interval of 3 seconds is sufficiently large; we therefore use $s = 3$ seconds in our measurements.

To validate the accuracy of our scalable calling scheme, every 100 calls, we call a random Skype ID among our second set of volunteers (see Section 2). We stress that these volunteers were not in the contact list of the tracking clients, so the patterns generated when calling them are identical to those of the other 10,000
users we are calling. On the 1,368 calls that we made when volunteers were online, we observed only 4 false positives (0.3%) due to patterns that have been re-ordered during parallel calling. By assigning each IP address to the only Skype user that is the most often designated by the packet patterns, we were able to remove all false positives.

### 4.2.3 Cost of the Scaling

To call 10,000 users on a hourly basis, we run our tracking clients on 30 physical machines, each one with a different IP address. Each physical machine runs one Skype client and can call 340 IDs per hour. We estimate the costs of running this measurement on a cloud computing platform such as EC2 [1] to be approximately $500 per week.

Preliminary tests suggest that it would have been possible to increase the number of called users by one order of magnitude with virtualization. Indeed, the main issue we faced is that running several tracking clients on a machine makes it harder to isolate packets from each client. One solution we tested but did not use in our scheme, is to run several tracking client per physical machine, each client in a different virtual machine. Because the goal in this paper is to demonstrate the feasibility of our scheme and not to fully optimize it, running a single tracking client per machine is sufficient.

### 4.2.4 Measurement Results

Whether our scalable calling scheme actually captures the mobility of a significant fraction of Skype users depends on three questions that we address in the following.

1) *Is it possible to periodically call a large number of Skype users?* In Fig. 3 (left), we see that at any given time, we are calling between 2,000 and 3,000 online users among the 10,000 users. The diurnal behavior is due to the heterogeneous distribution of Skype users worldwide. A large fraction of Skype users are from the US and Western Europe. So during the daytime in the US and Western Europe, there are more Skype users online than during night in these geographical areas. We also see in Fig. 3 (left) that after two weeks, we have found at least one current IP address for 9,500 users, which represents 95% of the users we were periodically calling. In summary, it is possible to periodically call a large number of Skype users.

2) *How often are Skype users online?* We define availability as the fraction of the time a given user is online. In Fig. 3 (middle), we plot the CDF of availability for the 9,500 Skype users that we have seen online at least once. Skype users are surprisingly available with 20% of all users available more than 50% of the time. One explanation for this behavior is that the Skype clients starts automatically at the startup of the system. In

summary, Skype users are highly available so one can call them to collect their location most of the time.

3) *Can Skype users be found in several locations?* Mobility results in a change of IP address geo-localized in a different city, AS, and/or country. For each user that is online at least once, we determine the different locations he visits over the two-week period. This location information is anonymized (see section 4.1.1). In Fig. 3 (right), we see that 40% of the 9,500 Skype users change city, 19% change AS, and 4% change country at least once in two weeks. In summary, Skype users run Skype from several locations so one can observe their mobility. In summary, Skype users often run Skype from different locations, and this mobility can be tracked by our methodology.

Our methodology to measure the number of locations of a user has two limitations. First, in some cases (e.g., dynamic IP address), MaxMind might erroneously associate a same user to different locations. We believe that such errors are very unlikely at the scale of a country or an AS, and only occurs rarely at the scale of cities so that it does not significantly impact our conclusions (see Section 4.1.1). Second, the IP address may not capture the location of users running Skype on their mobile phones [17]. Although this may impact our ability to track Skype users in the future, we believe that relatively few users fall into this category today.

We may observe that significantly more users are mobile among cities than among ASes for two reasons. First, some ISPs have broad geographical coverage, so users located in those ISPs are likely to move within the same ISP, even though they change city. Second, some ISPs provide country-wide free Wifi hotspots to their users. When users of such ISPs change of city, they are likely to use these hotspots, thus connecting from the same AS but a different city.

We note that, as the accuracy of IP geo-localization improves, it will be possible to determine the locations of users with much finer granularity. For instance, a recent paper shows that it is possible to geo-localize IP addresses with a median error distance of 690 meters [30].

## 5. FILE-SHARING USAGE OF SKYPE USERS

In the previous sections, we established that it is possible to map a person to his IP address in a scalable manner. We are now interested in validating that this scheme introduces a linkability threat where the identity of a person can be associated to his Internet usage. In particular, we focus in this section on finding the identity of file-sharing users. We focus on the BitTorrent application; however, other P2P applications – such as eMule [3] or Xunlei [12] – could instead be used.

One of the challenges here is that many file-sharing
<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>Figure 3: (left) Number of simultaneous and cumulative unique online Skype users (of 10,000) called in two weeks. (middle) CDF of availability of Skype users. (right) Number of locations visited in two weeks by each Skype user, sorted by decreasing number of locations. *Skype users are mobile.*</figcaption></figure>

users are NATed, that is, they may share their IP address with several users. We present in the following a scheme exploiting the identification field in the IP datagrams to check whether two different applications actually run on the same machine. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first ones to run and validate such a scheme in the wild.

In this section, we anonymized (as described in section 4.1.1) all localization information, we do not store IP addresses after the verification procedure, and we never store any information (including the infohash and the content name) related to the contents downloaded by a given user.

## 5.1 Methodology

Our measurement system comprises a *Skype tracker*, an *Infohash crawler*, a *BitTorrent crawler*, and a *Verifier* which communicate through shared storage. We begin by randomly selecting a set of 100,000 identified Skype users. The Skype tracker employs ten tracking clients to daily collect the IP address for the 100,000 users. The Infohash crawler determines the infohashes (file identifiers) of the 50,000 most popular BitTorrent swarms. Operating in parallel with the Skype tracker, the BitTorrent crawler collects the IP addresses participating in the 50,000 most popular swarms, and determines the IP addresses found in both Skype and BitTorrent. Finally, the Verifier attempts to initiate P2P communications with the two applications in order to verify that the same user is indeed running both of them. In the following, we describe in more detail the operation of each component. The operation of the Verifier will be described in Section 5.3.

*The Skype Tracker.*

We use the methodology developed in Section 3 and Section 4 to find 100,000 active Skype users. In order to daily call 100,000 Skype users, the Skype tracker uses ten tracking clients. Because we are now not in-

terested in fine grain mobility measures but instead in file-sharing usage, we only call each user once per day. We then analyze packet patterns to determine the latest IP address of these users and temporarily save them to a shared storage. (Keep in mind we collect the IP addresses not only of users that are online but also of all users that have logged into the system in the last 72 hours.) These IP addresses are then loaded from the shared storage by the BitTorrent crawler to determine which files are distributed from these IP addresses.

*The Infohash Crawler.*

We collect file identifiers (infohashes) from the PublicBitTorrent tracker [14], which is the largest BitTorrent tracker at the time of this writing. PublicBitTorrent publishes a file with all the infohashes it tracks on its website. This file is the dump of a request, *scrape-all*, supported by trackers running the OpenTracker software [19]. This request returns all infohashes of files it is tracking and the number of downloaders (leechers) and uploaders (seeds). We download this file every day from the PublicBitTorrent website and extract the infohashes for the 50,000 most popular files.

*The BitTorrent Crawler.*

In this step, we seek an efficient mechanism to obtain the IP addresses participating in the 50,000 most popular torrents. BitTorrent trackers such as PublicBitTorrent support a request, *announce started*, that returns a list of peers participating in a torrent identified by an infohash. As tracker developers became aware that such requests can be abused they started to limit the number of requests a given peer can send before being blacklisted. Therefore, instead of using the PublicBitTorrent tracker to collect IP addresses, we use a decentralized tracker (DHT).

We collect the IP addresses participating in the top 50,000 torrents from the Mainline DHT every hour for
two weeks. This DHT is a decentralized tracker that is primarily used by *µ*Torrent [7] and Mainline BitTorrent [2], the most popular BitTorrent clients. However, we note that other popular P2P file-sharing clients, such as Xunlei, also support it.

When a peer wants to download a new file, it contacts the Mainline DHT to obtain a list of peers distributing that file. This peer first finds the DHT node maintaining the list of peers for that file using the *find_node* request. That request takes an infohash as a parameter, and essentially returns the ID and (IP, port) pair of the DHT node responsible for that infohash. Then, the peer sends a *getPeers* request to that node, which returns a list of (IP, port) pairs belonging to peers distributing the file.

Unlike centralized trackers, we observed that DHT nodes do not implement blacklisting strategies. So we located the nodes responsible for the 50,000 files that we wanted to crawl and then repeatedly sent *getPeers* requests to collect the peers distributing these files. The whole procedure distributed over 10 machines takes about one hour.

Each of our crawling bots periodically loads the (Skype_ID, IP) pair of active Skype users into memory. If the IP address of an active Skype user is also found in a BitTorrent swarm, the user is possibly downloading the corresponding file (this correlation is performed on-the-fly and we never store the mapping IP address, infohash). However, we *must verify this hypothesis as an IP address may correspond to a NAT shared by several users*. We refer to this problem as the NAT problem. We note that several types of middleboxes, including NATs and IPv6 routers can use a single public IP address for different users. For the sake of simplicity, we use the term NATs when we refer to the generic notion of middleboxes in the following. (We note that dynamic IP addresses can also be shared by several users, resulting in the same problem.)

## 5.2 The NAT Problem

Depending on the Internet connectivity of a user, an IP address may correspond to a computer or to a NAT shared by a household, a company, or even an ISP. Because several users can share the same IP address, we may wrongly associate an identified Skype user to the BitTorrent downloads of another user behind the same NAT. To the best of our knowledge, all BitTorrent clients multiplex torrents on a single port. This port is picked at random at the installation of the client, and remains the same in subsequent utilizations. Therefore, we can associate each IP/port pair to a single BitTorrent user [19]. However, this observation alone does not allow us to match a Skype user to a BitTorrent user when the user is behind a NAT, as described below.

We found 15,000 users (out of 100,000) who have IP

<figure><img src="image_5.png" /><figcaption>Figure 4: CDF of the users using BitTorrent as a function of BitTorrent ports. 50% of collected *BitTorrent* users share their IP address with other *BitTorrent* users.</figcaption></figure>

addresses that were simultaneously found in Skype and BitTorrent during a period of two weeks. Of these 15,000 Skype users using BitTorrent, approximately 7,500 (50%) share their IP address with another BitTorrent user (as indicated by users with more than one port in Fig. 4). In other words, a significant fraction of the 15,000 Skype users are behind a NAT and may therefore not be the ones using BitTorrent (false positives).

## 5.3 The Verifier

We now describe the operation of our Verifier tool, which is responsible for definitively establishing whether Skype and BitTorrent are run on the same machine. Although more than one person *simultaneously* share the same machine, the granularity of a machine is enough for our purpose. For the sake of simplicity, we assume in the following that each machine is used by a single person.

Given an IP address that participates in both Skype and BitTorrent (matching IP), we now describe how the Verifier makes sure the person identified in Skype is indeed the one using BitTorrent. Consider a scenario where two users, Alice and Bob, are behind the same NAT. Suppose that, by calling Alice on Skype, we have determined that her IP address is in a swarm in BitTorrent, but the IP address is a NATed one. Two scenarios are possible. In the first scenario, Alice is using both Skype and BitTorrent on the same host. In the second scenario, Alice is using Skype on one host and Bob is using BitTorrent on another host. The second scenario corresponds to a false positive because Alice is not the one using BitTorrent.
To detect false positives, we leverage the predictabil-
ity of the identification field in the IP datagrams (IP-
ID) originating from the same machine [18]. As soon as
the BitTorrent crawler detects a matching IP address,
it signals the Verifier, which immediately calls the cor-
responding Skype user and, at the same time, initiates
a handshake with the BitTorrent client. If the distance
between the IP-IDs generated by Skype and those gen-
erated by BitTorrent is small, Alice is very likely to be
the identified BitTorrent下载er. Otherwise, Alice
is likely to be a false positive.

At the end of the verification procedure, IP addresses
are anonymized using a salted hash. All subsequent
analysis is performed on this anonymized data.

Limitations.

Our verification procedure has two limitations. The first limitation is that we can only initiate communication to public peers or NATed peers that accept incoming communications (e.g., when UPnP is used). This limitation significantly restricts the number of BitTorrent users we can verify. However, for this proof of concept, it is not necessary to verify all the Skype users who are downloading with BitTorrent. An aggressive attacker could easily verify more users by registering the IP address of the Verifier to the Mainline DHT. In this manner he would also receive incoming communication from peers whose NATs refuse incoming communications. Therefore, an attacker could in principle verify NATed peers also.

The second limitation is that we assume that the IP-
IDs originating from the same machine are predictable,
which depends on two conditions. The first condition
is that the IP-IDs originating from the same machine
should be predictable (e.g., sequential). Because IP-
IDs are attributed by the TCP stack of an Operating
System (OS), this first condition highly depends on the
fraction of OSes observed in the wild whose attribution
is indeed predictable. By testing Windows XP, Vista,
and 7, we verified that they all use sequential IP-IDs.
As these three versions of Windows alone account for
90% of all OSes found in the wild [13], we conclude that
this first condition is largely met. The second condition
is that NATs do not modify the IP-IDs as attributed
by the TCP stack of the machine. This condition is
supported by (i) related work in which this behavior was
not observed in practice [18] and by (ii) the specification
of the IPv4 ID field, which specifies that NATs should
ignore this field [15].

In conclusion, we expect that our verification proce-
dure based on the predictability of the IP-ID field to be
highly accurate, that is, with no, or few, false positives
(due to similar IP-IDs originating from different ma-
machines) and relatively few false negatives (due to OSes
with unpredictable IP-IDs attribution or IPv6 routers

<figure><img src="image_6.png" /><figcaption>Figure 5: After two weeks, we plot the 90th per-
centile of the shortest distance between the IP-
IDs on a ring of 2¹⁶ elements of the first Skype
and BitTorrent packets received from a verifi-
able user, sorted by increasing 90th percentile
(curve). There is one dot per verification exper-
iment. We verify 400 users out of 765 users.</figcaption></figure>

that re-attribute IP-IDs unpredictably).

5.4 Experimental Results

By running our verification procedure for two weeks,
we successfully triggered communication between the
Verifier and 765 unique users on both Skype and Bit-
Torrent. We refer to these users as *verifiable*.

We investigate the fraction of verifiable users that we actually fully verified. For the 765 verifiable users, we compute the shortest distance on a ring of 2¹⁶ elements between the IP-IDs of the first packet received from Skype and from BitTorrent. The smaller the distance, the more likely the identified Skype user is indeed using BitTorrent. In Fig. 5, we see that running this procedure finds 400 unique users for whom the 90th percentile of the distance is less than 1,000. We conclude that approximately 400 users (52% of the 765 verifiable users) are indeed using BitTorrent. We cannot conclude for sure that the remaining 48% of the verifiable users are not BitTorrent users (they might be false negatives). However, as we have seen that at least 90% of the OSes use sequential IP-IDs, we strongly believe that most of them are not using BitTorrent.

In summary, we have determined 400 identified Skype
users (from a random set of 100,000) who are definitely
using BitTorrent. Table 2 shows the information that
is readily available about the top-10 BitTorrent users.
When registering with Skype, all of these users provided
their last names and all but two users also provided
their first names. In addition, all but one of these users
<table><caption>Table 2: For each of the top10 verified user, we show the number of files shared by that user, whether the user provides in its Skype profile a first or last name, a city, and a country.</caption><thead><tr><th>Rank</th><th># Files</th><th>First name</th><th>Last name</th><th>City</th><th>Country</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>1</td><td>23</td><td>✓</td><td>✓</td><td>✓</td><td>✓</td></tr><tr><td>2</td><td>18</td><td>✓</td><td>✓</td><td>✓</td><td>✓</td></tr><tr><td>3</td><td>12</td><td>✓</td><td>✓</td><td>✗</td><td>✓</td></tr><tr><td>4</td><td>11</td><td>✓</td><td>✓</td><td>✓</td><td>✓</td></tr><tr><td>5</td><td>11</td><td>✓</td><td>✓</td><td>✓</td><td>✓</td></tr><tr><td>6</td><td>11</td><td>✓</td><td>✓</td><td>✓</td><td>✓</td></tr><tr><td>7</td><td>9</td><td>✗</td><td>✓</td><td>✓</td><td>✓</td></tr><tr><td>8</td><td>8</td><td>✗</td><td>✓</td><td>✓</td><td>✓</td></tr><tr><td>9</td><td>7</td><td>✓</td><td>✓</td><td>✓</td><td>✓</td></tr><tr><td>10</td><td>6</td><td>✓</td><td>✓</td><td>✓</td><td>✓</td></tr></tbody></table>

provided their cities of residence. However, we remind that we do not store any personal information (e.g., name and city) for the purpose of this measurement; instead, we only store a binary information indicating whether a personal information is available or not.

## 6. DEFENSES

In the previous sections we have seen that it is possible for an attacker to develop and deploy (possibly from a home) a tool that periodically determines the current IP address of a targeted VoIP user. Even if the VoIP user is behind a NAT, the attacker can determine the user's public IP address. Observing the mobility of a targeted individual could be used for many malicious purposes. In this section we briefly discuss defenses for this attack, both at the application level and at the user level.

One measure that can go a long way is for the designers of the VoIP signaling protocol to simply ensure that the callee's IP address is not revealed to the caller until the callee accepts the call. That is, before the callee accepts the call, callee's signaling packets are sent to supernodes or infrastructure nodes, and not to the caller; furthermore, the caller is not provided the callee's IP address during call set-up. By only revealing the callee's IP address after the callee accepts the call, then (i) it is no longer possible to make an inconspicuous call to the target; and (ii) if Alice chooses to block all calls from strangers (i.e., people not on her contact list), then a stranger will no longer be able to determine her IP address and observe her mobility. This solution has a very low overhead as only a few signalling messages are relayed. Thus, we strongly recommend that all VoIP applications adopt this simple mechanism.

However, even with this simple mechanism in place, a friend of Alice (that is, anyone on her contact list, including friends, old boyfriends, family members, employers, and employees) would still be able to determine her IP address (and location) when they call her and she accepts the call. We now outline some measures that

defend against this attack.

One blanket defense for these attacks is to have all calls pass through relays. When a datagram passes through a relay, the relay regenerates the datagram with the source IP address of the relay. If the relay can be trusted, then neither party in the call sees the other's IP. In fact, in Skype, if both caller and callee are behind a NAT, then the call is typically relayed through a third skype user (who is not behind a NAT), serving as a relay. The relays must be selected so as not to give away the location of the callee. (For example, the system shouldn't strive to find a relay in same city as the callee.) The main problem with this solution is that it detracts from the efficiencies of P2P communication because (i) relays must now be made available to support the huge bandwidth demands of large-scale real-time voice and video communication systems; and (ii) access ISPs will see an increase of upstream and downstream relay traffic.

In order to not excessively route traffic through relays, the system can be designed so that Alice can specify for which contacts in her address book the calls are to be routed through relays. For example, if Alice is only concerned about her boss observe her mobility, she can configure her client to have calls between her and her boss pass through relays. The client could also be designed to make this decision on a call-by-call basis: whenever, her boss attempts to call her, she is asked whether this should be a P2P or relayed call.

We briefly mention that another approach for providing location privacy is to run the P2P communication application through a third-party anonymizing service such as Tor [22]. However, the delay and throughput performance of Tor and similar services is clearly insufficient for supporting real-time voice and video [21, 24]. In addition to being inefficient, Tor also introduces privacy issues for certain applications (e.g., P2P file sharing) [20].

We conclude this brief discussion on defenses by mentioning that these location attacks actually have their roots in the current Internet architecture, for which all datagrams carry source and destination IP addresses. We are not advocating a total re-design of the Internet, but we mention that this and other Internet privacy problems could be resolved by using alternative underlying network architectures. For example, if the Internet were to use virtual circuits (as with X.25 and ATM), then it would be much more difficult for a stranger or a friend to observe a user's mobility.

## 7. RELATED WORK

### 7.1 Mobility

We now describe the related work on observing the mobility of users by using IP addresses and cell phones.
### IP Address Mobility.

Guha et al. [23] is the work on IP address mobility that is the closest to ours. The authors show that by periodically retrieving the IP address of dynamic DNS users, an attacker can observe the mobility of these users. Whereas the goal of their attack is similar to ours, there are two major differences between exploiting dynamic DNS and Skype to measure mobility. First, dynamic DNS allows to infer the identity of the user in “some cases” whereas we have showed that 88% of Skype users provide their birth name, and that 82% also provide either age, gender, homepage, country, or language. Second, targeting dynamic DNS users limits the scope of the attack. Whereas there are a few millions users of dynamic DNS in the world, we showed that much more Skype users are susceptible to have their mobility tracked.

### Cell Phone Mobility.

The Carmen Sandiego Project [16] recently showed how to use cell phones to observe the mobility of a user. The authors first use the caller ID service to collect persons-to-cell phone numbers mappings. Then, by accessing the Home Location Register (HLR), they show that an attacker can collect the current Mobile Switching Center (MSC) identifier for a given phone number. As MSC identifiers often gives the indication of the location of a user, an attacker can periodically collect that information to observe the mobility of an identified cell phone user. One important weakness of this attack is that there is no convention on how an operator attributes MSC identifiers. So the naming convention for MSCs varies from one operator to the other and it is hard to determine to which location a given identifier corresponds.

Even though it is not our primary purpose, we believe our scheme, and in particular the description of Skype packet patterns between caller and callee, also has the potential to significantly simplify the tracing of Skype calls.

To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to show that it is possible to use real-time applications to map a person to an IP address and to scale that scheme to observe the mobility of a large number of persons. As we have shown it might be possible to observe the mobility of 56 million identified Skype users worldwide at any moment in time, we claim that the scope and the severity of our attack are very severe.

## 7.2 File-sharing Usage

We now describe the related work on observing file-sharing usage and verifying users. Because we have used BitTorrent in this paper and it is one of the most popular file-sharing system, we focus on BitTorrent in the following. However, we remind that all file-sharing sys-

tems are in principle vulnerable to our attack.

In recent works, the scale of BitTorrent measurements has significantly increased [19, 28, 33]. For example, Zhang et al. collected 5 million IP addresses in 12 hours [33], Siganos et al. collected 37 million IPs in 45 days [28], and Le Blond et al. collected 148 million IPs in 103 days [19]. As noted by Le Blond et al. and more recently by Wolchok et al. [31], being able to continuously collect the IP addresses is a serious privacy threat in itself. In this paper though, we have not only collected the IP addresses of a large number of BitTorrent users but we have also identified a significant fraction of these users.

A security threat noted by Piatek et al. consists in injecting the IP address of random Internet users into BitTorrent trackers to falsely implicate them into copyright infringement [27]. We note that the ability to map a targeted person to an IP address significantly worsens this threat because an attacker could also implicate that particular person into copyright infringement.

As far as we know, we are the first to show that it is possible to find the identity of BitTorrent users without requesting that information from an ISP. We believe that this attack introduces a serious potential for blackmail and phishing attacks.

### Verification.

We relied on IP-IDs to verify the identity of BitTorrent downloaders. This technique has been used in the context of passively counting the number of machines behind a NAT [18] (on a LAN). As far as we know, it has never been used on the Internet to actively verify that several applications were running on the same machine. Alternatively, we could have used remote physical device fingerprinting [26] but using IP-IDs was simpler and sufficient for our purpose.

## 8. CONCLUSION

We have shown that it is possible for an attacker, with modest resources, to determine the current IP address of identified and targeted Skype user (if the user is currently active). It may be possible to do this for other real-time communication applications that also send datagrams directly between caller and callee (such as MSN Live, QQ, and Google Talk). In the case of Skype, even if the targeted user is behind a NAT, the attacker can determine the user's public IP address. Such an attack could be used for many malicious purposes, including observing a person's mobility or linking the identity of a person to his Internet usage.

We have further shown that by deploying modest resources, it is possible for an attacker to scale this scheme to not just one user but tens of thousands of users simultaneously. A prankster could use this scalable calling scheme to, for example, create a public web site
which provides the mobility and file-sharing history of all active Skype users in a city or a country. Parents, employers, and spouses could then search such a web site to determine the mobility and file-sharing history of arbitrary Skype users.

**Acknowledgements.** We would like to thank the volunteers for the considerable amount of time they have spent to help us test our scheme. We also would like to thank Justin Cappos, David Choffnes, Paul Francis, Krishna Gummadi, Engin Kirda, and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. This research was partially supported by the NSF grant CNS-0917767.

## 9. REFERENCES

[1] Amazon EC2. http://aws.amazon.com/.

[2] BitTorrent. http://www.bittorrent.com/.

[3] eMule. http://www.emule-project.net.

[4] FaceBook. http://www.facebook.com.

[5] Google. http://www.google.com.

[6] MaxMind. http://www.maxmind.com/.

[7] µTorrent. http://www.utorrent.com/.

[8] Number of Google Talk Users. http://tinyurl.com/6h4lxbd.

[9] Number of MSN Live Users. http://tinyurl.com/6z3mno8.

[10] Number of QQ Users. http://tinyurl.com/5w2scvq.

[11] Number of Skype Users. http://tinyurl.com/6ce49sv.

[12] Xunlei. http://www.xunlei.com.

[13] OS Market Share, 2010. http://tinyurl.com/6myem6.

[14] Public BitTorrent: An Open Tracker Project, 2010. http://publicbt.com.

[15] Updated Specification of the IPv4 ID Field, 2010. http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-intarea-ipv4-id-update-01.

[16] BAILEY, D., AND DEPETRILLO, N. The Carmen Sandiego Project. In *Proc. of BlackHat* (Las Vegas, NV, USA, 2010).

[17] BALAKRISHNAN, M., MOHOMED, I., AND RAMASUBRAMANIAN, V. Where is that Phone?: Geolocating IP Addresses on 3G Network. In *Proc. of IMC* (Chicago, Illinois, USA, 2009).

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