21
June
2005
|
07:56 AM
America/Los_Angeles

BitTorrent's Cohen: Avalanche is 'Vaporware' and 'complete garbage'

Ask BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen, as it seems many people have, what he thinks of Microsoft Research's Avalanche, their better-than-BitTorrent P2P program and you'll get an earful (or at least a blogful).


On his blog, Cohen writes:


"First of all, I'd like to clarify that Avalanche is vaporware. It isn't a product which you can use or test with, it's a bunch of proposed algorithms. There isn't even a fleshed out network protocol. The 'experiments' they've done are simulations."


I won't pretend to understand the technical niceties except to note that Cohen's critique is that the Microsoft simulation is rigged against BitTorrent. He concludes:


The really big unfixable problem with error correction is that peers can't verify data with a secure hash before they pass it on to other peers. As a result, it's quite straightforward for a malicious peer to poison an entire swarm just by uploading a little bit of data. The Avalanche paper conveniently doesn't mention that problem.

As you've probably figured out by now, I think that paper is complete garbage. Unfortunately it's actually one of the better academic papers on BitTorrent, because it makes some attempt, however feeble, to do an apples to apples comparison.