The Dubnet is an all-volunteer botnet. Its primary purpose is collusion within BitTorrent peer-to-peer networks. It is currently private.

The system's design is a a variation on 4th-generation peer-to-peer network models which seek to incorporate social connections with traditional P2P networking. Some related projects like Tribler, konspire2b, Wirehog, and more recently Vuze (formerly known as Azureus).

Dubnet nodes capitalize on the imperfect information within a swarm by to maximize network members' performance. In contrast to BitTorrent's default optimistic tit-for-tat strategy, Dubnet nodes collude with each other, giving preference for available upload capacity with the goal of maximizing overall download speed for a single torrent swarm.

If two downloaders have the exact same chunks of a file they are useless to each other. The BitTorrent protocol is very good at naturally distributing different portions of the files to each member of the swarm.

Further work can be done to collusively maximize the chunk differences among the Dubnet cabal and reduce inefficient overlap where it matters most (to us)

• Azureus 2.5 w/ the Peer Injector plugin accomplishes similar
• ctorrent-extended on the cabal nodes, with ctorrent-cmc for remote monitoring
• broadcast_torrent, a small Ruby script which scp's around the desired torrent, kickstarts ctorrent, and shuts things down when the C&C has retrieved the file

• Exploiting BitTorrent for Fun (Not Profit) - Liogkas, Nelson, Kohler, and Zhang, 2006

• Clustering and Sharing Incentives in BitTorrent Systems (Arnaud Legout and above)

• Tribler – pure 4th-gen BitTorrent client, providing a layer of social network functionality over searching and downloading. The project suffers from the fact that everyone must be running Tribler, and no one runs Tribler.
• Konspire2B – subscription-based P2P downloading (defunct)
• Wirehog – social P2P linked to Facebook (defunct)
• Private BitTorrent trackers operate on similar (but larger scale) principles