5 ms·
How are they supposed to know what you’re torrenting?
by tinus_hn 6y ago
How are they supposed to know what you’re torrenting?
- nsilvestri 6y agoI suppose they could have known by using a tool such as the one linked in this post.
- loeg 6y agoThe protocol is more or less all plaintext. The "best" peer to peer cipher available is rc4; almost no one uses it. The tracker announces can run over HTTPS, but often run over plain HTTP.
- userbinator 6y agoThe "best" peer to peer cipher available is rc4; almost no one uses it. ...which is unfortunate because even something like the anonymous DH that is specified, or more standard, TLS with random/self-signed certificates, would force monitors to need to MITM all connections in order to find out what they contain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_protocol_encryption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_protocol_encryption
- Hyperborian 6y agoOh god... you're not under the impression that bittorrent is a secure or anonymous protocol, are you?
- tinus_hn 6y agoNo but all they see is parts identified by hashes. How are they supposed to know whether is a Linux distro or a movie?
- Hyperborian 6y agoBecause, quite frankly, parts identified by hashes is not all they see. If you're monitoring and logging the traffic then it's trivial to not only determine the filename of a bittorrent download, but also everything you need to connect to the torrent yourself and download it to verify that it's what the filename says, if that's what you wish to do. And, personally, I'd expect someone to at least check the filename before accusing me of committing a crime. :(