BitTorrent Encryption Confuses the BPI, ISPs and Journalists Who Don’t Research
Written by Ernesto on November 09, 2007A recently published article by The Register claims that an increase in encrypted BitTorrent traffic is due to the fact that people want to hide or scramble the files they are sharing. Apparently some tech journalists, and in particular the anti-piracy organizations, have no clue what BitTorrent encryption actually does.
Encrypted BitTorrent traffic now accounts for 40% of all BitTorrent traffic in the UK according to the article. The Register claims that filesharers use encryption to scramble their data so they can protect themselves from being caught, and the comments from a music industry representative make it seem like people can indeed hide what they are sharing. Unfortunately, none of it is true
This is what Matt Phillips, of the record industry trade association the British Phonographic Institute told the Register: “Our internet investigations team, internet service providers and the police are well aware of encryption technology: it’s been around for a long time and is commonplace in other areas of internet crime. It should come as no surprise that if people think they can hide illegal activity they will attempt to.”
So if it’s not hiding anything, why do people use BitTorrent encryption then?
I’ll try to explain it once more to the BPI, IFPI and RIAA and some tech journalists, just so they don’t embarrass themselves again in the future. BitTorrent encryption has nothing to do with hiding the data you’re sharing, it only hides the fact that you’re using BitTorrent to do so.
Encryption was designed to prevent ISPs from throttling BitTorrent traffic, which they started doing approximately 2 years ago. ISPs use so called traffic shaping devices to identify and slow down BitTorrent traffic because it takes up a lot of bandwidth (read: costs a lot of money). BitTorrent encryption, which is now supported by all the popular BitTorrent clients, hides the protocol header. As a result, these devices can’t detect that someone is using BitTorrent and you can download at full speed.
So, encryption does not hide the actual data people are sharing, everyone can still connect to a BitTorrent swarm, record your IP-address, and send you an infringement notice.
Now back to the claim that 40% of the BitTorrent traffic is encrypted in the UK. My first question would be, how do they know that it’s BitTorrent traffic if it’s encrypted? Apart from that I think 40% is a little too high, unless the ISP that reported the data is throttling BitTorrent traffic of course. We’ve been tracking the number of people who actually use encryption and it is currently slightly below 10%. It could be of course that these people are responsible for 40% of the traffic, but I seriously doubt that.
Bottom line is, anti-piracy organizations should take some time to read up on what filesharing actually is before they are going to accuse people of something, but I guess that’s wishful thinking.
Previously: Prosecutor Announces Charges Against The Pirate Bay
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ON the three torrents I’m currently running at the moment. I have encrypted peers on 3 of 20 (15%),
5 of 15 (33%) and 8 of 20 (40%).
The last one is Fedora 8 which has a high percentage of US peers.
demonoid.com: The CRIA threatened the company renting the servers to us, and because of this it is not possible to keep the site online. Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for your understanding.
I encrypt my traffic now even though I’ve moved residences and my new provider doesn’t throttle. I figure if I start out with encryption then they won’t get the idea in their head that they can throttle traffic in the first place (unless they decide to throttle all of it :-O)
Also: #2 best comment ever; #19 worst
YES IT’S TRUE…
DEMONOID IS GONE AGAIN!
I’m surprised you’re surprised about the lack of accuracy of newsagencies. Whenever I stumble upon an article related to a topic I know a bit about more often than not it is full of mistakes. This always makes me wonder what kind of misinformation all the other sections contain.
“I’ll try to explain it once more to the BPI, IFPI and RIAA and some tech journalists, just so they don’t embarrass themselves again in the future. BitTorrent encryption has nothing to do with hiding the data you’re sharing, it only hides the fact that you’re using BitTorrent to do so.”
And I will explain to you that there is no such thing as encrypted BT traffic without a user deciding to enable it.
Something the vast majority of them decided to do based on a belief it would hide what they were sharing.
So the police, explaining that this won’t achieve this protection, are entirely correct.
Have you never heard of PeerGuardian?
The % of BT users who believe, employ and recommend BS useless countermeasures based entirely on misconceived notions of how protocols and networks work is rather high.
[quote comment="207442"][quote comment="207273"]And yeah, it doesn’t use IP addresses at all.[/quote]Ofcourse it does. But it routes the data through a chain of proxies to hide the source ip.
Don’t try to be smart when you don’t know the fundamental facts of the net.[/quote]
Actually I2P doesn’t and no it’s not proxying “to hide the source ip” either.
You obviously haven’t bothered to look into it at all, how’s that for “trying to be smart”?
[quote comment="207678"]
Actually I2P doesn’t and no it’s not proxying “to hide the source ip” either.
You obviously haven’t bothered to look into it at all, how’s that for “trying to be smart”?[/quote]
Actually it’s a layer on top of IP. This means there are still IP addresses being passed between individual clients and local router points and any external access points (such as HTTP proxies etc) with the outside internet.
To be fair, I2P is one of the more promising ideas I’ve seen. The main problem lies in scalability of throughput.
I’ve enabled it for two reasons:
1. there’s no reason with nowadays CPUs use encrypted connections. Everytime you don’t encrypt anything, you give the ISP the chance to sniff it which means sooner or later some politician will order them to sniff it. If everybody encrypts, ISPs have a good chance to say: We can’t do shit about it, it’s all encrypted. The only thing THEY can then do is to make encryption illegal. However that’s not only dumb, such laws might actually make people wake up. Maybe.
2. My ISP plays fair but the other one’s might not. Both sides have to enable encryption in order to make it work. Thus, everybody should enable it and show his solidarity with the poor suckers in the land of the free. Just have a look at your traffic, you can easily see the forged TCP-RST floods from Comcasters.
Sorry, the first point was meant to read:
“there’s no reason [...] to NOT encrypt your connections”
If you set your client to ignore unencrypted peers, wouldn’t you be blocking out a lot of the bad peers (MD, MPAA, etc.) that would need to see connect to you in order to see your IP?
dunson, have you read the article? BitTorrent encryption does not hide your IP address. There’s no reason for bad parties to avoid encryption. Encryption has nothing to do with avoidance of MPAA or whoever. Its sole purpose is to make it more difficult to identify the BitTorrent protocol.
Of course I read the article. My question is basically, do bad peers trying to snatch your IP address have to be unencrypted? If they cannot encrypt their traffic, then ignoring them would give another measure of protection.
No. Also MD and others simply use modified “standard” sofware, so you can’t be ahead of them because they use the same. This encryption takes very little CPU nowadays, so it isn’t really an issue. You should only avoid unencrypted connections if you are sure that your ISP messes with them.
WTH is with posting?
Tried last night, more than once and tried again, my post wont go through at all.
There’s a few things wrong with this article though, especially the blind faith that an ISP cannot detect encrypted torrent traffic. There’s at least 2 easy ways to identify it 100%.
You shouldn’t be so quick to point out flaws in others articles unless yours is bulletproof.
“My first question would be, how do they know that it’s BitTorrent traffic if it’s encrypted? ”
“the number of people who actually use encryption and it is currently slightly below 10%”
wtf, so how do *you* know?
I beg to differ with you. I dislike the fact that you assume this is a voluntary migration to encrypted traffic. Has anyone figured the percentage of bitorrent clients that come with encryption enabled verses how much of the population is using each of these clients. Bet you it’s around 40%.
HAX.
BT protocol encryption isn’t working anymore. My ISP successfully throttles my bitTorrent traffic even when I force PE and refuse legacy connections. The same is true for other people using my ISP, as well as other ISP’s in the UK
For all the noise on here about not being able to hide who you are because of IP this and IP that might want to check up on MUTE: http://mute-net.sourceforge.net/
They got it wrong on purpose to discredit file sharers in the eyes of the general public. They hire experts.
yes, mute, the project that requires a donation to download the file thats hosted on sourceforge[1] and makes lots of assumptions about make/gnu make.
1. http://sourceforge.net/projects/mute-net/
not to mention the author admits he is no longer interested in the project.
#45 - dan is right. Everyone needs to switch to Mute.
It does need further development [read more features & better searching] but if everyone went there we would be much better off.
#46 - no, it doesn’t, if you go to the sourceforge page first, no donation required.
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