BitTorrent Hydra: Anonymous Hidden Tracker Via Tor
Written by enigmax on July 25, 2009It’s been less than a month since many feared the BitTorrent world would collapse due to a $7.8m investment in The Pirate Bay. Since then OpenBitTorrent has come along to largely take its place, backed up by PublicBT to spread the load. Now comes Hidden Tracker, a brand new public tracker which hides itself using Tor.
There is cautious optimism that things in the BitTorrent world are looking more secure than ever before following the initially depressing news that The Pirate Bay will probably be sold off by August.
First we reported on OpenBitTorrent. Would it become a Pirate Bay replacement? Turns it out does the tracking element rather well, already tracking all of the Old Pirate Bay’s torrents.
But what if OpenBitTorrent goes up in smoke? Administrators of other torrent sites already considered that possibility when they came together to create PublicBT, a ‘pirated’ version of OpenBitTorrent. The tracker is open to all, just like OpenBitTorrent.
So if The PirateBay closed tomorrow there are already two other sites available to do the tracking, but all good things come in threes.
The brand new Hidden Tracker has a homepage that looks very similar to those sported by the trackers above. It is an open tracker, just like the other pair but this one has an added layer of security.
Most file-sharers will be at least aware of the Tor network and the fact that it provides anonymity. Most BitTorrent users should also know by now never to use Tor for file-sharing – it is painfully slow and actually ruins the network for other people.
However, Tor has a neat trick up its sleeve known as ‘hidden services‘. Tor is able to provide anonymity to servers by offering Tor clients or relays which run specially configured software. In order to hide the IP address of a service (in this case, a BitTorrent tracker), they are accessed via the special Tor .onion pseudo TLD (top level domain). The Tor network sees .onion and routes data to and from the hidden service, completely anonymously.
Hidden Tracker is operated as a Tor hidden service and ideally the user would install Tor along with their regular torrent client in order to use it – it would be essential for correct processing of its announce hyperlink;
http://z6gw6skubmo2pj43.onion:8080/announce
However, with a helping hand from the handy Tor2Web service, it’s possible to make a modification to the above URL and use Hidden Tracker even without Tor installed. Simply replace .onion with .tor2web.com, like so;
http://z6gw6skubmo2pj43.tor2web.com:8080/announce
The owners of Hidden Tracker say they want to make an open but secure public BitTorrent tracker for the enjoyment of everyone but find the legal attacks tiresome, hence hiding their tracker with Tor:
“To protect the identities of the people and hosting service who run and maintain this tracker, we’ve used a Tor hidden service to conceal the IP address(es) of the server(s) that run the tracker. We hope that this will help to increase the reliability of this tracker for everyone.”
The website itself can be accessed via http://z6gw6skubmo2pj43.onion (with Tor installed) or via http://z6gw6skubmo2pj43.tor2web.com using the web.
All we need now is a few content-agnostic Imageshack-style sites where anyone can upload torrents and the replacement of The Pirate Bay will be more or less complete.
Completely painless, wasn’t it?
Update: The admin of Hidden Tracker emailed to say that they had to change the announce URL of the tracker. The article has been updated to reflect that. Additionally, he tells us that as tor2web caches pages for longer than is desirable, it is better to use Tor along with the .onion links on ‘young’ torrents.
Previously: BitTorrent Behind the Scenes: BTjunkie
Next: Music Industry Groups Threaten Hunger Strike Over Piracy
88 Responses
great big fan of trackers! and p2p and indexing site’s
@2
well said.
…and they don’t care to read comments either. They can’t run a check to find that openbittorrent is same as thepiratebay, technically speaking, and nor can they learn when someone else tells them.
Why are people uploading stuff to TPB KNOWING they are going to make it a pay site? Everyone should be uploading to these trackers so the switch can be as painless as possible.
Surely you could set up a torrent indexing site hidden with tor, and it would be impossible to tell were the server is so impossible to shut down?
@3 don’t let that put you off.
It’ll all turn out ok in the end ;)
From the web site:
“To make this work – whether seeding or leeching – you’ll need to get Tor and tell your bittorrent client to use Tor for tracker traffic, and to resolve hostnames. But please don’t use Tor for your actual peer to peer traffic. Not only will that choke up the Tor network, and make life difficult for many people, but you’ll get terrible download speeds.”
Can someone tell me how to tell utorrent to use Tor only for tracker traffic and not to use Tor for p2p traffic?
this is fucking retarded. A deleted comment must get replaced in it’s contents with a message.
these windows noobs at tf simply delete it as it never existed and then all the index of comment shifts.
holy shit
Fuck off leechers, don’t ruing a legit service like Tor. A lot of people actually use Tor for more important and legitimate purposes (evading government censorship etc..) If you need to dl p2p stuff get on a private tracker or get usenet. Last thing FREEDOM software needs is to be associated with pirates!
it’s just a matter of time before everything becomes completely invisible thanks to VPN, encryption, present and future covert technologies. One day everyone will be trading data in absolute and complete privacy.
It won’t be long until such brand new technology is branded as illegal. However, it’ll be hard to arrest people if no one can prove even without an IP address what people are doing.
When that day comes, we’ll laugh at the idea of the way The Pirate Bay was in the old days.
The RIAA/MPAA won’t be able to do a single thing about any of it. In fact we’d all have to thank them because if it wasn’t for them, no one would have ever had the need to think this technology up.
I love how the hidden torrent has a similar background to torrentfreak! Did you guys plan this?
Now this is a really good idea. I’ll be using this tracker for all my uploads from now on.
Thanks for the heads up.
a stab in the dark here…
i reckon the OWNERS of this ‘bittorrent hydra’ are none other than ENIGMAX AND ERNESTO FROM TF?!
whaddya reckon?
I’d recognise that background anywhere :)
Lol TF, lol
I’m very suprised that this hasn’t happened before now, Tor services have been around for a while now. There has been a RapidShare replacment running as a hidden Tor service for a while, but this is the first time that I’ve seen it done with a tracker.
“Why are people uploading stuff to TPB KNOWING they are going to make it a pay site?”
“They”, who are buying it, are not going to keep the torrents uploaded – they won’t be able to, legally.
“They”, TPB, are already automatically adding the openbittorrent tracker to all uploaded torrents – when thepiratebay.org is sold, all torrents will keep on running.
@ 5 / enigmax
Do you know something we don’t? ;)
“All we need now is a few content-agnostic Imageshack-style sites where anyone can upload torrents and the replacement of The Pirate Bay will be more or less complete.”
We can already use imageshack for that:
http://torrentfreak.com/hidim-converts-torrents-into-png-images-090714/
use onioncat
It is alot better at doing such things
never cared for TPB – demonoid’s still going plus there’s mininova and a lot of other really good private sites that put quality first . . . let TPB die already!!
This is abuse of the TOR network. Idiots will be configuring their clients to send data over tor, choking the network. Unless they’re going to donate an equal or higher amount of bandwidth (think seeding) to the TOR network, this will hurt the people who need to use it.
Also, installing TOR is a bit tricky for the average user.
Oh no, now all the pedos (the only people who actually use Tor) will be bitchy about the even slower speeds.
haha.
openbittorrent.com is not going down because openbittorrent is not storing .torrent files at all.
openbittorrent is storing only some text numbers and openbittorrent even don’t know what those numbers are, they are not able to trace any ip nor they store a single file.
so there is no reason to shut down openbittorrent.
TPB was providing .torrent file world wide and anti piracy was forcing TPB to go down because of .torrent files.
openbittorrent = no .torrent file and they don’t know who is uploading nor can check which ip sharing what.
Great news! The more the merrier!
btw would anyone mind seeding this? I figured this might be the place to ask…please….http://www.torrentportal.com/details/3610596/Steven.Seagal.Filmography.1988-2007.html
@18: Exactly. The less average users we have, the easier it will be for the rest of us to continue without being caught. The way I see it, if you can’t work it out or aren’t prepared to learn, you shouldn’t be allowed to ride.
It isn’t THAT hard to set Tor up, and there’s plenty of tutorials online.
When using this make sure you configure your client to only use tor for hidden services, and not p2p connections.
This is easily done in uTorrent (by making sure “use proxy server for peer-to-peer connections” is unchecked), but I can’t say the same for other clients.
Only use tor for trackers*
” if you can’t work it out or aren’t prepared to learn, you shouldn’t be allowed to ride.”
That’s what the book publishers and record labels and motion picture companies have been saying about the licensing agreements for their copyrighted entertainment for nearly a century. Be prepared to learn or you won’t be allowed to ride. Tanenbaum starts Monday.
Nice, I’ll use this. No problem reading the site @ http://z6gw6skubmo2pj43.onion/, though no joy on tracker comms yet as I’ve only seen “Proxy error: Host Unreachable” and “Proxy connect error: offline (timed out)” so far for http://cvf7u2qes6j52sip.onion:8080/announce on µT.
Fvcksake, TF, why all the censoring? Don’t you practice what you preach?
[Mod note - comments with a substantial portion being a link, or random characters gets flagged for moderation as being potential spam. We check it, and let it through (but only one, of the 3 identical comments you posted). It's just a way to deal with spam is all.]
@Schrödinger’s Pussy (I just wanted to write your nick down)
someone looks nervous
private trackers are for losers (thats why all their users use public when they cant find what they want private)
also is anybody else having trouble connecting? openbittorrent and publicbt run fine through tor, but http://cvf7u2qes6j52sip.onion:8080/announce is timing out
Yet more proof that piracy thinks it can hide from the law and that they moral accountability is their biggest enemy. In the end, all these srvices that people will think can conceal their activities will face the consequences of their actions, just like those who choose to trade away their freedom for a hard drive of pilfered material.
@neo yawn styles
Man you’re BORING, so tired and unoriginal.
To those people complaining about abusing TOR, a tracker over TOR would only send TRACKER data over the network. Peer-to-peer transactions would still obviously be direct connected. It’s to hide the IP of the tracker itself, not the peers.
Did those who copy & pasted the description on http://z6gw6skubmo2pj43.onion/ actually read what they pasted? Hidden services work just for TCP, not UDP…
LOL I love it!
At this rate, by Christmas well be using TOR and about 10 1024bit(or 2024bit hehe) encrypted SSL/AES/RSA Certificates with uTorrent ;-O
God bless Sweden :) <3<3
Viva la Openbittorrentén, PublicBT, HiddenTrackerén
I hope the deal dosent go through tell GGF and Peter Sunde What you think! *jinx jinx deal* lol
There is still some hope for PirätByrån this deal goes against all TPB stands for and all the hard work, the protests, the lobbying :(
anyway shout out to Jon Newton p2pnet.net :)
So we should all go out of our way to configure tor for torrents just to save the tracker admins asses?
Everyone on the swarm would still be just as vulnerable as ever.
Ther’s only one place I’ve known so far that uses the gray/pink color scheme…
Those other trackers aren’t a full replacement for the Pirate Bay yet. I tried adding them to a couple torrents and they didn’t find any seeds of peers. Granted, they were more obscure things, but then again, it’s the obscure stuff that needs saving the most, not the really popular stuff that you can get from a dozen other sources.
” private trackers are for losers (thats why all their users use public when they cant find what they want private)
also is anybody else having trouble connecting? openbittorrent and publicbt run fine through tor, but http://cvf7u2qes6j52sip.onion:8080/announce is timing out”
Ok So private trackers are for losers? I’m downloading at my full line speed and your scratching your balls wondering why the public tracker is down.
Jackass.
It looks like there’s a mistake in the article: the website says that the tracker’s address isn’t cvf7u2qes6j52sip.onion, but z6gw6skubmo2pj43.onion – just like the site itself.
Using z6gw6skubmo2pj43.onion like the site says seems to be working fine (if a little slowly) in uTorrent.
When i edited the .torrent file in torrenteditor.com and placed “http://z6gw6skubmo2pj43.tor2web.com:8080/announce” as a Tracker it said “Failed to connect to 207.241.238.33: Permission denied”
Why this is so???????
@Mod note
Fair enuf, sorry.. I was getting vexed, couldn’t figure if it was the IP, bad word, don’t like cats, or wtf… ;)
…
The tracker url is working ok here now, looks like it’s been changed to match the web page > http://z6gw6skubmo2pj43.onion:8080/announce
The funny thing with “neo styles” is that he talks about “moral” things, which, any philosophy book would tell him, have nothing to do with justice,
and “THE LAW” as if it was a religious artifact that everybody should worship, while we all know the weight of the lobbies on “THE LAW”, lobbies which generally work AGAINST the common interest.
So “neo”, go back to the church of the holy ghost and dance on the nice drum’n'bass; and stop using words you don’t even know the meaning of.
They was no legal justification acording to the swedish law to declare the TBP operators guilty of contrefeting.
1) The pirate bay servers do not contain any copyrighted contents.
2) The Priate bay never operated for profit.
3) There is no law in sweden that would make the pirate bay operation illegal.
So there is no point discussing the legal aspect of it since there is no legal aspect.
The only thing left to discuss is the coruption of justice under corporate foreign influence and how they are going to put in jail all the criminal cops and lawers who participated in this parody of justice.
So, if I got it right, nobody knows the address I’m connecting to?
@42
any body have solution?????????
The admin of Hidden Tracker got in touch with new updated information – it has been added to the article
another crappy gay public tracker …great
@Bleeper – go enjoy your gay privet torrent sites, knowing half of theyr torrents were tracked by public trackers like TPB…
Filthy unthnakfull leecher…
@27 Reasoned Mind: Oh, I understand copyright laws. I just choose to not respect them, and that will continue until the laws change. I’m not anti-copyright, I’m just sick of it being used to make the average consumer’s life hard via DRM, etc. Creative Commons and copyleft work better than copyright ever did.
Also, to all of the morons using the names Unreasoned Mind, Neotroll, etc., grow the hell up.
I tried to use it
(1) I installed tor and privoxy
(2) set rtorrent to use privoxy
(3) created a torrent that’s using the onion address
(4) gave it to a friend
The tracker shows 1 seeder and 1 leecher. This far it works.
However I don’t get any peers from the tracker.
@51
” I just choose to not respect them, and that will continue until the laws change.”
This is direct, honest and revealing, but badly misguided and wrongheaded. You also might consider choosing a loftier goal for willful disobedience than your technical ability to rip off music and movie files. lol
We all must abide laws we don’t necessarily appreciate in a wide range of instances. Were every citizen in a given society to take this shortsighted and remarkably selfish attitude, laws would grow to mean little and personal accountability would largely be lost. This anarchy may actually be your goal. If that’s the case, you’ll fail.
I have no real problem with you following your own personal morality, Sendaii, until it steps on other people. Infringement is illegal. Your philosophy of life inevitably leads to surveillance, loss of privacy, higher fees and taxes, a slower network, apprehension, conviction and eventually punishment. And it is all the result of online pirating. It is not unreasonable to anticipate the rights holders will fight for their legal rights if you feel you should be allowed to fight for your illegal beliefs.
If you are okay with all that, that’s also intellectually honest. But when pirates complain about DPI, law enforcement, tainted judges and purchased jury pools, they just come off as a hypocritical and poorly informed pilferers. And speaking of just that, Tenenbaum starts tomorrow. :-)
This seems like a pretty good idea.
You could also buy a .com domain name and forward it to the .onion address; saves remembering a long and complicated one.
@52.
I’m not sure if you would need to tunnel it through Privoxy; maybe try it directly through Tor.
I am seriously thinking of using my rented high-spec dedicated server to create a torrent index, however, I have a few questions that I hope somebody could clear up:
1. How anonymous is this really? I know a fair bit about Tor but if I was to create a torrent index what other steps would I need to take to be anonymous?
Can it be pin-pointed back to my host in any way?
2. If the Tor service or the web server is rebooted wouldn’t the .onion address change as it is not static?
**If somebody is interested is joining or helping me on this send me an email:
jdg8tb [-AT-] gmail [-dot] com
@Rekrul
Solution: add that tracker to a bunch of torrents, upload them everywhere and encourage everyone and their mothers to do the same.
http://torrenteditor.com/ will let you edit a tracker to a .torrent without breaking it. You’ll be able to use both the old and new trackers, so you can add as many public trackers as you want – then upload them for everyone. This way, they’ll have the convenience of already having seeds but won’t fail just because the old trackers go down.
@56
yeah, we can use torrent editor but why the hell it is showing me an error. See comment 42.
Perhaps I am missing something, but how do you search for torrents on any of these trackers?
I am going to keep using TPB until they start asking for money, or the switch is offical.
great but the only problem is that i receive an error?
Tor wasn’t meant for this.
It’s too bad Tor is slower than a double amputee trying to run in the olympics.
“Also, installing TOR is a bit tricky for the average user”.
Vidalia bundle is super easy to install, and the TOR button for Firefox is in the installer, so configuring proxy settings isn’t necessary.
tor is not for transfer big files.
this will overload the network and will make it slow.
” 37 Jul 26, 2009 at 05:23 by Anonymous
So we should all go out of our way to configure tor for torrents just to save the tracker admins asses?
Everyone on the swarm would still be just as vulnerable as ever.”
exactly, that why several people have already said if your going to make these annon dark nets, THEN USE a tunnel and put Multicast at the heart of it…
you can then just put out a DHT Multicast hash with your annon bits attach to this Multicast tunnel do a simple request/advertise/send etc with this annon hash and get the binary files you need without anyone ever knowing your real IP address as your all just a random hash No on a multicast multi-point to multi-point torrent tunnel…. simple and far quicker than todays Unicast torrent offering.
but the devs wont even try this simple thing for 10 shared hash multicast tunnel peers at a time.
@53: I understand what you are saying, Reasoned Mind, this is war and neither side is going to stand still while the other attacks.
Copyright holders DO have the right to defend their copyrights, and I have no problem with that. What I do have a problem with, however, is when the law itself is abused by the likes of the RIAA to milk huge profits from induvidual people. Remember Jammie Thomas? Fined $1.92 million for sharing 24 songs. Look me in the eyes and tell me that is justice.
Creative Commons, however, does not have this problem and artists can still be paid for their work.
Maybe they should just stop logging IP addresses beyond the moment needed to get the torrent?
” 66 Jul 26, 2009 at 17:56 by anonymous
Maybe they should just stop logging IP addresses beyond the moment needed to get the torrent?
”
thats my point, you dont really need to ever Know even your own real IP addess never mind others in the swarm IF YOU are ALL CONNECTED TO A generic MULTICAST address over a temp tunnel with sudo random hashs you all make up and use for that session.
you can use tor code as the bass or make your own, it doesnt matter, as long as all parts of the initial chain never give out a single real IP after you have been pased to the main thread or however you make these Multicast tunnels and DHT hashs on the fly
but the devs dont want to innovate that before someone else does it first…
@52 @58 Its only a tracker, not an index of torrent. To get more peers you need to put the torrent onto a site where others can grab it. e.g mininova
Anonymous p2p has been going-on for years in Japan. They use the programs Winnie, Share, and Perfect Dark (neat name!). File-sharing there is a criminal offence and the police have used extreme measures. For example, they have “firewalled” a suspect’s house so that it could only reach police-controlled computers. They then downloaded a copyrighted file and thus inferred that it was on the suspect’s computer. The same attack would work on Tor, but would be illegal in most countries.
@65 Sendaii:
What you’re not understanding is that the goal isn’t really to get compensation from those ordinary people, but to scare others into stopping pirating. What else are they supposed to do? They tried adds and awareness campaigns, and it didn’t help. Not the only thing left for them is to sue those people against whom they manage to build a case so that others will stop thinking “I’m just a small drop in the flood, so nothing will happen to me”. Try to see this from the other side’s standpoint and you will understand they aren’t really the devils pirates make them look like.
@70: That tactic isn’t working either. The more people they sue, the more that pirate. What they need is a change of business model, which is genuinely all that most of us want. If I could get my music at fast speeds, DRM-free and good quality for a reasonable monthly fee, I would buy music. Pirates aren’t all the lazy freeloaders who would steal their own grannies that the entertainment industry makes them look like.
@71
Exactly; nicely put.
Pretty old idea, but good. Only problem is TOR’s very limited bandwich. Browsing tor sites is already very slow, so if we dont get more hi-speed tor nodes, the whlole tor network is going to be unusable.
Hopefully his will wipe the smug grin from the faces of the MPAA and RIAA shitheads.
Using Tor: Assume Exit Nodes are Monitored
https://security-shell.ws/showthread.php?t=35127
Tor run by united states government?
The top tor exit nodes are provided by the US government. I googled for the info about the top 3 being run by the gov. but it appears they have either been removed from the web or a more comprehensive google search will have to do.
The Title is quite wrong.
It Should Read:
BitTorrent Tracker Throws In With Neo-Nazi’s & Pedo’s.
TOR LoL
http://publicbt.com/
http://z6gw6skubmo2pj43.tor2web.com/
http://openbittorrent.com/
why are all these websites the same?
that is, they have the same layout and have the same information (except for the tracker info)?
All of them are an “-an open tracker project”, what is this really?
It just seems very suspicious.
Could these sites all be made by the same person, trying to profit somehow?
@77
this is bcoz these site are using same program.
Posted this on an older thread but it’s not likely to get read as much on an old post… interested in other’s opinions in relation to torrent indexing… (sorry for being slightly OT!!)…
If a torrent was trackerless and we had to manually add the openbittorrent.com, etc. tracker addresses manually)… why would it still be illegal?
1) It would NOT contain copyrighted content.
2) It would NOT faciliate the LINK to copyrighted content.
It would just be a chunk of numbers that confirm the validity of copyrighted data… BUT would NOT be a reproduction or resemble the copyrighted content in any way, and therefore should NOT be protected by intellectual property rights.
Otherwise, we’re talking about making a sequence of numbers, that do NOT resemble any likeness to copyrighted content and do not allow individuals to connect to that copyrighted content… illegal.
Could we get away with hosting a torrent site as long as we don’t facilitate that link by not providing the tracker address? (and the end-user uses their own initiative to actually connect to the trackers, etc.)
lol @ all the anti-piracy niglets complaining here
m3, doesn’t seem like a bad idea, but you might find that still ‘they’ would continue to do whatever necessary to shut the service down. The rules are twisted and bent constantly to capture anything that threatens controlling interests, and so if the threat still exists, they’ll hit it. The game is rigged. Best one not even grant them the capability of focusing upon any concentrated point as a target, in my opinion, if continued security of operation is what you’re after.
I do like the idea, though, and would be at least interested to see how things would play out if it was tried.
I’m not saying this isn’t smart, i’m just thinking, if this is such a big “EUREKA, no more police knocking down our doors”-moment, then why don’t ALL Trackers use Tor?
The background on this site looks a bit familiar.. Huh. :)
Http://strikeys-torrents.com
Well rather new about 14Weeks old dedicated staff and uploaders and just got new design.
[quote]why don’t ALL Trackers use Tor?[/quote]
I think they should all use tor, it will be much more difficult for anyone to know exactly where data is coming from. The main drawback I see is the speed (or lack therof). I would love to see the responses when everyone starts using TOR. Try and stop that.
Those worrying about Tor exit node spying – it´s irrelevant in this case. The traffic doesn´t leave the Tor network, hence exit nodes aren´t used (instead all server nodes are used).
Using Tor adds another layer of complexity to torrenting, that´s why not everyone´s using it. Also the whole volume of tracker communication might quite well kill the whole Tor network (yes, the bandwidth used for talking to trackers is nothing compared to the bandwidth used by the data that´s being shared, but considering how much tracker-communication there is [(initial announces on new torrents + periodic announcing on running .torrents + final announces for .torrents being stopped) x millions of users] running all tracker-correspondence through Tor is a bad idea. Remember, TPB used massive amounts of bandwith for it´s operation, altough I´m unsure how much of it was used by the tracker and how much by the website serving .torrents).
[quote]
Also the whole volume of tracker communication might quite well kill the whole Tor network
[/quote]
Each new Tor user that uses Tor to connect to something ALSO becomes a node in the Tor network. Which means that as long as each user is capable of routing as much Tor traffic as (s)he generates h(im/er)self, Tor will stay balanced. The only node that gets HEAVY load is the tracker itself, but that’s nothing new.
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