Encrypting BitTorrent to take out traffic shapers
Written by Ernesto on February 05, 2006Over the past months more BitTorrent users noticed that their ISP is killing all BitTorrent traffic . ISP’s like Rogers are using bit-shaping applications to throttle the traffic that is generated by BitTorrent.
But, at the same time two of the most popular BitTorrent clients are working together to implement header and message stream encryption in order to take out these traffic shapers.
Currently both Azureus and uTorrent included this new form of encryption (specs) in their latest Beta’s. The fact that these two clients are actively working together to implement this new feature is promising and will make this form of encryption the new standard since the users of these two clients cover the majority of all BitTorrent users.
There are two “encryption modes” available.
The 2 different payload encryption methods plaintext transmission and RC4 provide a different degree of protocol obfuscation, security and speed. Where the plaintext mode only provides basic anti-shaping obscurity, no security and low CPU usage the RC4 encryption obfuscates the entire stream and not only the header and adds some cryptographic security at the price of spent CPU cycles.
The question now is.. Does it work? and how effective is it? If it works it will definitely offer a great solution to all BitTorrent users who suffer from traffic shaping ISP’s.
Bram Cohen, the creator of the BitTorrent protocol reacted quite negatively on these new developments. He questions the need for encryption since only a few ISP’s are actively shaping traffic. Among other things he also fears incompatibility between clients and increased cpu usage. Although these arguments can be countered quite easily, developers should keep them in mind.
But the fact is, if this new encryption method is launched successfully it will be a huge step forward for the BitTorrent community.
Previously: Speed up your torrents II
Next: Opera integrates BitTorrent in their Browser
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I’m With RogersCable… Ive been useing torrents for the last year just when i started to enjoy the service rogers starts messing with torrents…
I’m Not impressed i pay 45$ a month for internet speed the highest u can get with rogers and they are limiting me…
And personally Torrents Are so popular. Accept im starting to feel that utorrent and the big downloading program programmers dont seem to care about the people who have crap speed. Quit being little girls big deal u secure a line so they cant see what ur downloading and problem fixed if i could build it i would ..u guys are acting like girls… Build it and just put a warning up if u use this u may get in shit… simple
I’ve done everything under the sun. Changed port a million times, put the encryption in every possible configuration. I am with Rogers in Ontario and have purchased the Extream package….what a waste!!!
Blocking P2P only deters some.
If i want a movie I could just find it on a site and download through rapid share for instance, or even ftp or mIRC.
Blocking P2P prevents legal sites, providing legal torrents from operating properly, such as http://www.freelegaltorrents.com
I have a mixed opinion on this issue of encrypting the BitTorrent traffic. Personally I think that BitTorrent is a revolution.Here in India the fastest connection which can get theoretically is 2 MBPS. I can’t even believe that there exist connections like 10, 20 or 100 MBPS.
However using dial-up connection of my CDMA phone I was able to download a lot of data through BitTorrent in last 2 years or so. I also read the post by Bram Cohen on his blog and I have the following points to make:
1. First of all I think that the argument given by the ISPs that the BitTorrent and other P2Ps generate a lots of traffic does not sound logical enough. I mean what do they mean by lots? BitTorrent is basically an application level protocol which means that its using the underlying (underlay) TCP/IP model of the Internet. If an ISP is charging me for the “unlimited” Internet access at fixed monthly charges then I have all rights to use that to its maximum possible extent.The fact is that if the capacity of my connection pipeline is some amount “X” GB per month at maximum possible rate offered to me then I can not cross that limit and download more than that under any circumstances irrespective of I use BitTorrent or not. So this concept of “unlimited connection ” is really a misnomer because a fixed rate connection for a fixed period of time can only allow you to download a certain fixed maximum amount of data no matter what you do or how you use the connection and ISPs know this thing. So their blaming the BitTorrent users or the protocol is totally wrong. They are just trying to hide the failure on their part to provide the claimed/advertised service.
2. Now coming back to the encryption issue. I think its a good idea to perform traffic encryption so that BitTorrent traffic cant be detected by shapers or sniffers. But again it depends on the extent of the success of this scheme because as Bram mentioned on his blog, a protocol generating huge volumes of bi-directional traffic is bound to get caught and shaped sooner or later but as long as this scheme works, its fine.
3. I’m completely in agreement with the BitTorrent community but what I feel that we need is a middle solution which would result in a win-win situation for both sides. Lets admit friends that we the BT users need an ISP as much as the ISP needs costumer. I mean what if all the ISPs in the world start using Traffic Shaping or worse: what if they are able to crack the BitTorrent encryption method being used. So I guess that retaliation(from both sides) is not a solution.I personally want to use BitTorrent to its full capacity as I mentioned above.
4. Also I think that in place of traffic shaping or bandwidth throttling, the ISPs should pay more attention towards traffic localization.As we all know that as long as the traffic remains within an ISP’s network, the ISP does not have to pay anything but if lots of cross-ISP traffic is generated then the ISPs have to pay to the higher-up(Tier I and II etc.) ISP. In fact one of the prime reasons why BitTorrent traffic shaping takes place is because of the fact that it generates lots of cross-ISP traffic without taking into account the underlay connection of the peers and this comes costly for the ISPs.But traffic shaping is not a solution for this either as it’ll not reduce the amount of cross-ISP traffic but only degrade the performance at the customer’s end.
http://www.binitbhatia.blogspot.com
what this is too neeky stop the mumbo jumbo -rc4 encription good or bad what are he risks
[quote comment="105751"]what this is too neeky stop the mumbo jumbo -rc4 encription good or bad what are he risks[/quote]
yh i wanna know the same as dis guy
Found all the above helpful.
To let ppl- if ur on British Telecom (BT in UK) use Bittorrent on port 443 (https) and encrypt ur traffic (using azureus etc) and all is well
m294k
I love reading peoples’ posts from a year ago that were so confident in their views. Now crushed by the inevitable.. unveiling they’re stupidity
George.. I would spend more time thinking about your ideas before you express them with such confidence.
your a perfect example of ‘you can’t believe everything you read’
[quote comment="498"]Completely worthless. I’m extremely disappointed that people who know enough to develop BitTorrent clients don’t know enough about networking to realize that this is completely pointless. Sure, encrypting the stream may get around a few packet shapers, at the moment but, unless they reconfigure BitTorrent to run everything, incoming and outgoing, over port 80 or 443 then it will be trivial to block BitTorrent.
BitTorrent is far too reliant on specific ports and far too reliant on those ports being open inbound. Because of this, it is ridiculously simple to block BitTorrent traffic. Encrypting the stream will not hide the fact that it is BitTorrent traffic. It will only prevent someone from identifying what the BitTorrent traffic is transferring. This may be a good thing for pirates but, it won’t stop the network administrator from blocking BitTorrent ports completely.
The truly successful P2P app will allow multiplexed up/downloads over SSL port 443. This will be encrypted and will appear like most other https applications. It will also traverse most any firewall and be stupidly simple for the user to operate. The down side is that it would require a centralized server to make it work so, it isn’t desireable for piracy but, I think this is also a good thing. I’m sure you’ll disagree with me on this one though because you no doubt feel that “sharing” music is your God given right and is not stealing or piracy.
Bram Cohen’s BitTorrent is doomed because it doesn’t work as well as it should (multiplexed downloads should perform far better than BitTorrent), it relies too heavily on opening obscure inbound ports, it is too hard for the average AOLer to get working, it is too easy to block.[/quote]
I’t really works! i’m witch terra isp inn chile an i download at 5 kb/s max speed with this new function i download at 120kb/s!!! i’ts really an improve.
My ISP (Telus) kept sending me letter saying how I was using too much bandwidth, which on my end was the result of torrent. So what did I do? I installed Netlimiter and the letters stopped.
I’ve just enabled encryption on Asureus and I’ve seen a noticeable improvement in speed. It kind of sucks that while I was cooperative with my ISP they were not so cooperative with me.
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You are a bunch of loonies!
There are perfectly good reasons to block/limit Bittorrent.
Trying to work around make the Network administrators harder, and decrease the quality of service for Voice Over IP, videoconferencing and other needed services in the enterprise. The enterprise who pays for the damned Internet service must have the ability to prevent employees from downloading movies, or at least not taking the whole bandwidth
It’s easy to get around this issue. Purchase a VPN at http://www.strongvpn.com or the Relak place. They are cheap, and provide security too. My issues were gone, and I have other uses for it too.
Use VPN service
VPN Torrent
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