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How would public BitTorrent tracker servers be better than a single rendezvous-server run by the tool's author? With trackers, you're revealing the fact-of-tra
by gojomo 6y ago
How would public BitTorrent tracker servers be better than a single rendezvous-server run by the tool's author?
With trackers, you're revealing the fact-of-transmission, transmission-size, & endpoints to any number of unknown remote parties. Potentially, attackers not even on the privileged network-path from origin to destination could tee off a copy of your encrypted data for offline analysis.
With Magic Wormhole's rendezvous-server, only one server, run by the same person whose code you're trusting (& can audit), briefly relays encrypted control-messages. (It might even be limited in its ability to deduce the size of the transfer – I'm not sure.) And if that's still too much, you can run your own rendezvous server.
It seems to me the amount of information leaked in the BT Tracker approach is strictly (& perhaps massively) more, to more entities, than that leaked in using the Wormhole author's server.