understanding bittorent privacy

[bwanaaa]

From wikipedia:
"After the DHT was adopted, a "private" flag analogous to the broadcast flag was unofficially introduced, telling clients to restrict the use of decentralized tracking regardless of the user's desires.[16] The flag is intentionally placed in the info section of the torrent so that it cannot be disabled or removed without changing the identity of the torrent. The purpose of the flag is to prevent torrents from being shared with clients that do not have access to the tracker. The flag was requested for inclusion in the official specification in August, 2008, but has not been accepted yet.[17] Clients that have ignored the private flag were banned by many trackers, discouraging the practice.[18]"


Suppose the privacy flag is set in a torrent descriptor file and that torrent descriptor file is uploaded to a private site, X, in Ireland. That implies there is only one tracker for these torrents- and it is at X. But neither the torrent descriptor nor the torrent itself carries any dynamically changing information as to where the pieces are or have been. So how does X know when I am seeding? It obviously knows my IP from my browser when I log into the bbs at X. But how does the tracker keep track of the ip of EVERY SINGLE SEEDER? suppose that torrent descriptor is uploaded to a bbs in China. How does a tracker in Ireland know about a seeder in China and a leecher in Mongolia?

The purpose of torrenting was to distribute server load. Anonymity was a beneficial byproduct. That a tracker can know who is seeding and what they are seeding makes it a target for PRISM,etc. Would something like this be useful:
http://www.oneswarm.org
?

 

[Mushkins]

Anonymity was a beneficial byproduct.

Not sure where you're getting that, anonymity was *never* a byproduct of bittorrent. In fact, plenty of people have tried to shoehorn it into bittorrent with only minimal success over the years.

You're making direct connections between your computer and their computer, and sending metadata back and forth with the tracker. Bittorrent is in no way, shape, or form a private or secure protocol. It's about as open as open gets, that's how it works.

 

[lxskllr]

What is it you're trying to accomplish? You can create private networks, and anonymous networks, but as noted above, bittorrent is open by design.

 

[Savatar]

Looking into OneSwarm, it would help offer some protection from the most common methods that are used to catch BitTorrent thieves by larger entities... but because it says it proxies the request through other nodes before it arrives at your system it's going to be a lot slower (probably making it too slow to consider for anyone who torrents large files regularly, since the speed of the slowest connection along the route will be the limiting factor). Tor works in a similar way to help with 'anonymous' web browsing, but if you've ever used it, you may have noticed that even loading basic websites can be super slow (usually the request gets proxied between distant locations). And I should note that it is still not completely fool-proof.

The major reason that BitTorrent users are investigated is when they share copyrighted material with the general public, since that is usually illegal (for example, unless you own the copyright). Since BitTorrent clients typically share with anyone who wants the torrent by default, this makes it risky to run grab torrents, even if you are using it downloading something that you have a legitimate license to. Every case of a user then leveraging your resources to download even part of the copyrighted file could, in theory, constitute infringement (and legal precedent has shown the penalties can be seen as severe, since you are potentially sharing with everyone, even if only a few people retrieved the file). Most commonly, companies detect this by working with third-parties to get torrents from public places and then try to download them and see who shares the data.

If you are worried about this, the easy answer is don't use torrents to download anything that is copyrighted (movies, games, tv shows, or music). Additionally, even the basic step of disabling uploads on your torrent client and running something like PeerBlock (which blocks several media and third-party companies which are known to engage in monitoring activities) would be go a long way to prevent recourse. However, this defeats the open nature of torrent, then - since most people wouldn't be uploading those files - but if you think about it, those kinds of files probably shouldn't be openly available via torrent to begin with (at least not without a license acquisition and validation system in front of it, so that users can legally purchase the material).

If you are more paranoid, several users go through rather complicated steps to mask their illicit torrents nowadays. People have migrated to 'darknets', (aka Friend-to-Friend networks, or F2F) which are essentially closed communities which offer torrents only to people who are a member and maintain a good reputation by uploading several different materials themselves. People use remote VPN services (some even hosted in foreign countries) to download torrents quickly and then transfer encrypted through the VPN back to their systems (making it a 2-hop process). In general, while darknets might actually make sense for certain cases like academic circles or enthusiast groups (it's not all illegal, after all, unless the content itself is illegal), and while VPNs are actually useful in many cases for many different reasons (to greatly increase the initial download speeds, for example) those practices are generally an indicator in and of themselves that you are doing something that you shouldn't be doing to begin with. And, again, also not completely fool-proof.

If you have to start going through this much trouble because of copyrighted or classified material, you should give serious thought to taking a hard look at what you are doing, ask yourself if it's really important/worth doing, and whether it's worth the trouble (and, potentially, inevitable consequences). It may be seen as something 'everyone is doing', but everyone who does it knows better... and it's usually justified by something silly like 'if only the content was cheaper' or some misguided sense of altruism.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

Bittorrent isn't private, nor can it be unless you first tunnel it through another proxy service to mask your IP address.

The server is a great place to target to harvest information, but simply joining the swarm and downloading from the other peers and seeds immediately tells you the IP address of those members.

There should be no expectation of privacy when using bittorrent.

 

[John Connor]

VPN and Peerguard. http://torrentfreak.com/vpn-services-that-take-your-anonymity-seriously-2013-edition-130302/