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It's solving for this problem: http://xkcd.com/949/ http://xkcd.com/949/ It operates at the torrent level, not the file level, so while you certainly can creat

It's solving for this problem: http://xkcd.com/949/ http://xkcd.com/949/ It operates at the torrent level, not the file level, so while you certainly can create a new torrent with updated content, it'll show up as a new entry instead of an update. As a quick technical sketch, it streamlines torrent creation, transferring torrent references to others, torrent downloading (you either get a link your client understands, or a pre-built, quick-start client with the torrent already installed), and provides temporary cloud backed seeding. Disclaimer: I work on the project as an engineer. These comments are my own, and have nothing to do with Bittorrent the company.

icebraining 15y ago
So despite the post title, it's not really a direct Dropbox competitor, since it won't support realtime syncing, right? Btw, since one "donates" disk space in exchange for free service, I assume that will contain data from other people; is that protected (encrypted) or could I just peruse through your photos if I happened to be a peer chosen to seed them?
- chimeracoder 15y ago
  I'm not sure how this is implemented, but I can imagine a case in which this would work out. First, let's assume the data is encrypted with some strong encryption algorithm and similarly strong encryption key. This provides some security, but a lot less than you might think. Because data is being stored locally for a potential attacker, it is very easy for them (hypothetically) to make a large number of copies of that data and then distribute it for brute-forcing. This dramatically decreases the amount of time it would take to crack the encryption, even by brute force. [1] However, this assumes that they have the entire data at their disposal. In a torrent, you oftentimes only have chunks (say 1 MB each), and everyone doesn't download the entire torrent. So someone may only have a few megabytes worth of data. Still that's potentially enough data to contain sensitive information, even a few pictures. However, now let's assume that the data is scrambled. This means that the data is divided into 1 MB chunks of data that are not necessarily contiguous. So a 1 GB torrent would have 1000 chunks of 1 MB each, but each chunk of size 1 MB would have data from various parts of the torrent. The scrambling mechanism could be randomized and sent (securely) to the second party so that they are the only ones able to fit the pieces of data together correctly. The protocol could enforce that individuals cannot host more than _____ chunks/MB of the same file, or even that a file has to be distributed among IP addresses from different IP blocks (allocated geographically), thus reducing the chance that a single attacker has access to large parts of the same file. It does not rule out the possibility of a coordinated attack over a large geographic region, but it reduces the risk, and it would probably suffice for most use cases. Heck, people send public Dropbox links over plaintext, so it's not like we're talking about people who place a high value on security anyway (or, at least, people who think that their data is valuable enough to be worth the effort to crack). [1] There's a nice website that illustrates the advantage of having local copies of the encrypted data, but I can't find it now. It was basically a password strength-checking website that tells you how long it would take to crack your password by various methods.
  - icebraining 15y ago
    Oh, I'm sure it can be protected, no doubt. And you probably don't even need scrambling, just generate a random AES key for each torrent and distribute it only to the people who you shared the torrent with - passwords aren't needed. I was just looking if it was actually protected or assumed public.

icebraining 15y ago

So despite the post title, it's not really a direct Dropbox competitor, since it won't support realtime syncing, right? Btw, since one "donates" disk space in exchange for free service, I assume that will contain data from other people; is that protected (encrypted) or could I just peruse through your photos if I happened to be a peer chosen to seed them?

chimeracoder 15y ago
I'm not sure how this is implemented, but I can imagine a case in which this would work out. First, let's assume the data is encrypted with some strong encryption algorithm and similarly strong encryption key. This provides some security, but a lot less than you might think. Because data is being stored locally for a potential attacker, it is very easy for them (hypothetically) to make a large number of copies of that data and then distribute it for brute-forcing. This dramatically decreases the amount of time it would take to crack the encryption, even by brute force. [1] However, this assumes that they have the entire data at their disposal. In a torrent, you oftentimes only have chunks (say 1 MB each), and everyone doesn't download the entire torrent. So someone may only have a few megabytes worth of data. Still that's potentially enough data to contain sensitive information, even a few pictures. However, now let's assume that the data is scrambled. This means that the data is divided into 1 MB chunks of data that are not necessarily contiguous. So a 1 GB torrent would have 1000 chunks of 1 MB each, but each chunk of size 1 MB would have data from various parts of the torrent. The scrambling mechanism could be randomized and sent (securely) to the second party so that they are the only ones able to fit the pieces of data together correctly. The protocol could enforce that individuals cannot host more than _____ chunks/MB of the same file, or even that a file has to be distributed among IP addresses from different IP blocks (allocated geographically), thus reducing the chance that a single attacker has access to large parts of the same file. It does not rule out the possibility of a coordinated attack over a large geographic region, but it reduces the risk, and it would probably suffice for most use cases. Heck, people send public Dropbox links over plaintext, so it's not like we're talking about people who place a high value on security anyway (or, at least, people who think that their data is valuable enough to be worth the effort to crack). [1] There's a nice website that illustrates the advantage of having local copies of the encrypted data, but I can't find it now. It was basically a password strength-checking website that tells you how long it would take to crack your password by various methods.
- icebraining 15y ago
  Oh, I'm sure it can be protected, no doubt. And you probably don't even need scrambling, just generate a random AES key for each torrent and distribute it only to the people who you shared the torrent with - passwords aren't needed. I was just looking if it was actually protected or assumed public.