Firewall Wizards: P2P traffic

[Dave Piscitello <dave () corecom com>]

This is interesting reading. The statistics are a bit old but the 
conclusions probably remain accurate. Some management chains react to 
popular press conclusions. IMO, this is relevant to firewall and 
security admins for several reasons - bandwidth abuse and  illegal 
distribution of licensed and copyrighted material are the most obvious.
Enjoy.

Is P2P dying or just hiding?

Abstract— Recent reports in the popular media suggest a significant
decrease in peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing traffic, attributed
to the public’s response to legal threats. Have we reached the end
of the P2P revolution? In pursuit of legitimate data to verify this
hypothesis, we embark on a more accurate measurement effort of
P2P traffic at the link level. In contrast to previous efforts we 
introduce two novel elements in our methodology. First, we measure
traffic of all known popular P2P protocols. Second, we go beyond
the “known port” limitation by reverse engineering the protocols
and identifying characteristic strings in the payload. We find that,
if measured accurately, P2P traffic has never declined; indeed we
have never seen the proportion of p2p traffic decrease over time
(any change is an increase) in any of our data sources.

http://www.caida.org/outreach/papers/2004/p2p-dying/p2p-dying.pdf

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