Research Article
Gotta Catch’em All! Improving P2P Network Crawling Strategies
@INPROCEEDINGS{10.1007/978-3-031-06365-7_19, author={Alexander M\'{y}hle and Andreas Gr\'{y}ner and Christoph Meinel}, title={Gotta Catch’em All! Improving P2P Network Crawling Strategies}, proceedings={Digital Forensics and Cyber Crime. 12th EAI International Conference, ICDF2C 2021, Virtual Event, Singapore, December 6-9, 2021, Proceedings}, proceedings_a={ICDF2C}, year={2022}, month={6}, keywords={Peer-to-peer systems Blockchain Network crawling Internet measurement}, doi={10.1007/978-3-031-06365-7_19} }- Alexander Mühle
Andreas Grüner
Christoph Meinel
Year: 2022
Gotta Catch’em All! Improving P2P Network Crawling Strategies
ICDF2C
Springer
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-06365-7_19
Abstract
Network crawling has been utilised to analyse peer-to-peer systems by academics and industry alike. However, accurately capturing snapshots is highly dependant on the crawlers’ speed as the network can be described as a moving target. In this paper, we present improvements based on the example of a newly developed Bitcoin crawler that can be utilised to reduce resource usage/requirements of crawlers and therefore speed up capturing network snapshots. To evaluate the new strategies, we compare our solution, in terms of increased scan-rate and increased hit-rate during crawling, to a popular open-source Bitcoin monitor. Blocking time is reduced on average to 1.52 s, resulting in 94.7% higher scan-rates, while time needed to capture a network snapshot is reduced on average by 9% due to increased hit-rates during network crawling. While we show our improvements at the example of a new Bitcoin crawler, proven concepts can be transferred to other P2P networks as well.
