How To Encrypt BitTorrent Traffic
Written by Ernesto on April 16, 2006More and more ISP’s are limiting and throttling BitTorrent traffic on their networks. By throttling BitTorrent traffic the speed of BitTorrent downloads decrease, and high speed downloads are out of the question.
The list of ISP’s that limit BitTorrent traffic, or plan to do so is growing every day, and according to the BBC, the ‘bandwidth war’ has begun.
Are you not sure if your traffic is being throttled Check the list of bad ISP’s.
But there is a solution. Encrypting your torrents will prevent throttling ISP’s from shaping your traffic. I will explain how to enable encryption in Azureus, uTorrent, and Bitcomet, the three most popular torrent clients.
What does encryption Do?
The RC4 encryption obfuscates not only the header but the entire stream. This means that it’s very hard for your ISP to detect that the traffic you are generating comes from BitTorrent.
Note that RC4 uses more CPU time than the plain encryption or no encryption. It is however harder to identify for traffic shaping devices
How can I do this?
This is different for all clients; check the setting for your favorite client below.
1. Go to: Tools > Options > Connection > Transport Encryption
2. Check the ‘require encrypted transport’ box.
3. Choose RC4 in the ‘minimum encryption’ dropdown box
note that RC4 uses more CPU time than the plain encryption or no encryption. It is however harder to identify for traffic shaping devices
4. You can choose to tick the ‘Allow non-encrypted outgoing connections if encrypted connection attempt fails’ box. This will ensure compatibility with clients that are not using encryption. However, it makes it easier for your ISP to detect BitTorrent traffic. I recommend that you try to tick this box first. If you are still not getting proper speeds untick it
5. Tick the ‘Allow non-encrypted incoming connections’ box
That’s it, your BitTorrent traffic is encrypted now.
1. Go to: Options > Preferences > Advanced > Connection
2. Go to: ‘Protocol encryption’ You can choose between ‘auto detect’ and ‘always’. Auto detect will give you more connections but offers less protection against traffic shapers.
I would recommend to try auto detect first, if that doesn’t increase your speeds you need to switch to always
That’s it, your BitTorrent traffic is encrypted now.
uTorrent
1. Go to: Options > Preferences > BitTorrent
2. Go to ‘Protocol encryption’, you can choose between ‘enabled’ and ‘forced’. ‘Enabled’ will give you more connections but offers less protection against traffic shapers.
I would recommend to try ‘enabled’ first, if that doesn’t increase your speeds you need to swich to ‘forced’.
3. Ticking ‘Allow legacy incoming connections’ allows non ecrypted clients to connect to you. This improves compatibility between clients but makes you more vulnerable to traffic shapers.
I would recommend to tick this box, but if that doesn’t increase your speeds, untick it!
That’s it, your BitTorrent traffic is encrypted now.
Good luck and happy torrenting
Previously: Filesharing Around The Globe
Next: George Bush vs. The RIAA?
294 Responses
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what about on ares does can this work on that as well , my chat room doesnt work anymore =\ can someone help with this ? plz
I’ve got the VPN service account which encrypts my torrents as well. Furthermore it encodes all the traffic that I have. Also the speed became better. I use http://www.strongvpn.com May be its me so lucky, but no problems had been occured.
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Me think this good democratic way for using cybernet frem mw comput3er!
Like the creator of BitTorrent said, The internet in the states is just another public utility. US tax dollars should fund high capacity fiber optics for our country to use just like or road infrastructures. Other contries can use what connections exist already like it is now. They could have access to the supposed tax funded fiber lines if they contributed to the cost. Thats my 2cents :P
Thank u very much
Tobad only 5-10% of the people use this feature when I check the logs.
ok, i’ve enabled encryption, but how do i ‘force’ it (as specified in the article)? I did everything described in the tutorial and haven’t seen any difference.
there is too many things
if the encryption is the way to prevent packets from being identified, then how is it I still get letters from Rogers Canada saying they have had a complaint about me in The US from various companies (like MGM) who have tracked my downloading with bittorrent? Is there something I can do to prevent them from seeing my end or is it just BS because they are tracking all illegal torrent files anyways? btw, my speed with encryption average 100-400kb/s on the downloads with good seeding so it definately works for me.
I’m not intimately familiar with how the encryption works but I’m fairly certain that it cannot hide the source of packets.
It probably hides the content of the data being transmitted from 3rd parties but source & destination can’t be encrypted or how could the network route it to the right place?
Note, also, that those people looking for copyright violations are themselves downloaders directly cconnected to uploaders. The only way to obscure your identity from someone you are connected to is to use a much more sophisticated protocol designed for annonymity like freenet.
Did you know that using SSH encryption with your in client encryption will make it impossible for your ISP to detect torrent traffic? So they won’t trigger bandwidth throttling or packet shapers.
Check out http://torrent.thruhere.net
fok the price is ridiculus
prefer paying for renting DVDs or another isp !
fok nutsell !
It’s a sad fact of life that ISPs across the world are throttling bandwidth not just of torrent users, but everyone on the internet. They simply can’t afford to provide the pipes for all those Gigabytes of YouTube shit, so they’re implementing these new restrictions which hurt the “educated but illegal” downloader.
Pipex in the UK is really temperamental. I have a dynamic IP which sometimes gets me 100Kb/s download and 50Kb/s upload, but it seems to average out more like 30/20, even when everyone else in the UK is offline.
This encryption fix didn’t have any immediate effect, but I found the article very interesting.
I’ve also been experimenting with the Tor/Privoxy network and Peer Guardian to try to gain some anonymity, and they seem to be pretty useful for cutting out the crap that comes down the pipe. I’m not sure if TorrentFreak has written articles on these things, but I think more people need to learn about how to become free of ISP and external snoopers.
join the facebook group http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=22831345087
to protest Bell Sympatico and Rogers limiting P2P traffic in Canada.
Btguard.com good program for privacy and comes with a Putty encryption
You people are amazing….i recently had to reformat my hard drive and start from scratch, because i think my isp somehow blocked the folder i kept my downloaded movies in. When i try to open the folder it says explorer has encountered an error and needs to close…
With all the help from you guys, i plan on never getting caught again lol
my ISP Cox, shut down my internet for a day i had to call and they said coz i downloaded a copyrighted movie using btorrent.
so i guess the steps in this srticle don’t work anymore
Sympatico throttling can’t be bypassed because it’s apparently whitelisting-based. (If it’s not on the “OK list”, it’s throttled)
I’ve had cases where Subversion (a source code control system) timed out because they put it into the same throttling class as BitTorrent and their throttling doesn’t discriminate between SYN packets and other types.
I’ve also seen similar problems with DCC file transfers (sharing a funny pic with your IRC buddies, anyone?) and various other “esoteric” protocols.
I’ll be switching to TekSavvy as soon as they get back to me on having switched me off flat-rate bandwidth without any warning. (beyond the “surprise! you owe us an extra $30″ message on my bill)
Macs Suck. Get A real PC. Not A Whack-N-Toss.Ain’t Used A Damn Apple Since Apple ][ E .It Sucked
Hey check this out!
this is way too cool!
http://pluking.blogspot.com
[quote comment="7016"]I use BT Broadband (British Telecom, not Bit Torrent, although that would be the ULTIMATE ISP…) in the UK. I have just changed from BitLord (no encryption) to BitComet. Speed has gone from 40kbs to 107kbs and still rising.
Heres some random musings;
Any business that sells you a product with the caveat that you can’t actually use is needs a good kick in the happy place.
My definition of ‘fair use’ is: ‘as much as I f*&^ing can
Imagine a bus company that sells season tickets, but if you make more than 2 journeys a day, the bus won’t go more than 10mph. Or a bus company which owns 1 bus but sells 20,000 season tickets and guarantees all of their customers a seat (of course the fair use policy limits you to 2 journeys a week, standing room only).[/quote]
I use Bitlord, is there a way to set encryption. What do you recommend.
Thanks for the great tips!
thanks for all the great tips. im relatively new to torrents and ive been using bittorrent and want to switch to utorrent. will it continue downloading and seeding the torrents currently active in bittorent? do i have to change anything? im in AU using AAPT (its crap and im going over to tpg adsl 2+) and couldnt connect to tracker to seed but Peer Guardian from http://phoenixlabs.org/pg2/ has fixed the prob :)
Another site to check out is http://w2.eff.org/br/ devoted to protecting our rights to free speech online.
Actually TELUS can track bandwidth usage. If you log into your account online you can see for yourself how much of your limit you have used. If every user can see for them selves I’m pretty sure they could charge extra if they wanted although I have never heard of this happening. plus 1 for telus minus 50 for bell and rogers…
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