SecureIX Offers Anonymous BitTorrent Downloads
Written by Smaran on February 04, 2007A company called SecureIX is offering a free VPN service which allows you to hide your IP address from peers in a BitTorrent swarm or P2P network. Not only that, the service also encrypts and tunnels your data, making it extremely difficult for your ISP to sniff or shape it.
SecureIX launched last year with almost no hype surrounding it. Even we only came to know of it recently. Why something so seemingly important went unnoticed, is unknown.
What SecureIX offers is a whole package of ’secure services’. An IMAP/POP SSL-enabled e-mail account with PGP encryption and 1 GB storage, Usenet newsgroup access, and an encrypted VPN service. All of this free for personal use.
Instructions to set up VPN access are sent to the e-mail address you get when you sign up with SecureIX. That way, there’s definitely no chance of anyone intercepting e-mails from the site to you.
A passage on the site talks about how SecureIX provides added piracy:
As soon as you connect to our VPN server your computer is assigned a new IP address, an IP address that is owned by us, not your ISP. Unless you are using one of our static IP packages there are no records that link a single user to the IP address. The IP address is shared by many users. Remote servers on the Internet that try to identify you by your IP address will fail.
What I don’t understand is why a company would give away a service like this for free. Although, the site reserves the right to change their policy in the future, their “current plans are to always provide a free service.”
But how safe is this free service? After all, they also offer Business VPN for a price, so it is a commercial service. And even if your ISP doesn’t have your data, it’s almost assured that SecureIX does, as you’re using their servers to tunnel. In this way, they’re taking over from your ISP. Great idea, but who knows if we can trust SecureIX any more than our ISPs?
Where SecureIX could really come in handy is if your ISP is blocking encrypted BitTorrent transfers. In Canada, Rogers is throttling all BitTorrent connections, encrypted or otherwise. BroadbandReports.com writes, “Rogers has updated Cisco traffic-shaping hardware to perform more sophisticated deep packet inspection to again limit BitTorrent bandwidth consumption. Some users are using VPN software SecureIX to get around the new traffic shaping efforts, with mixed results.”
Previously: TorrentPod Episode 23
Next: Russian BitTorrent Trackers Shut Down
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I don’t understand why setting up a VPN server would be so important. It’s free storage for 1 GB, and it’s secure. Why should I start using it?
I would not use this. Looks fishy.
Would be funny to see all the Peer Guardian fanboys get busted with something like this though.
How about is a service provide by a company collecting IP’s for the MIAA, RIA or others institution ineterest to get that information???
The service is free, so it should be a catch here….just becareful guys!!!
Hi:
I just passed by TORRENTSPY a few minutes ago, and my NOD32 av detected an attempt to install a VIRUS! Just from opening the page, I didn’t downloaded anything!!
It’s unbelievable!! First these guys allow ads from spyware torrent clients and now this!
The name itself - torrentspy - is making a lot of sense now. Perhaps they should also try torrentrojan …
going a bit off topic,
@Pax3: it’s not their fought. They put some code on their page and a third party supplies the ads.
http://forums.torrentspy.com/showthread.php?t=37255
well I have been using SecureIX’s service for a while(since it started), I’m not really worried about mpaa and what not cos the content I download is mostly Japanese Animation which has not been licensed by any American Company. I’m from Malaysia and we have been throttled silly by our main ISP. Few months back they started shaping the traffic, and after the Earth Quake in Taiwan, they started rejecting connections by AGENTS. Basically not only have to deal with 3kbps download …now we have NO connection to trackers.
A combination of SecureIX’s services N PAW seems to have worked out quite well for me. For other’s some say it didnt make a difference at all.
Gerald
“A passage on the site talks about how SecureIX provides added piracy”
Don’t you mean privacy, rofl!
I don’t trust a privacy website that will display my password in plain text, but thats just me.
You are basiclly running everything you do online right through their servers.
Even if they are clean, It wont stop authorities from trying to sieze the information from SecureIX.
And the support forums are like a graveyard.
Id stay well clear.
@ Ricerrage:
Concurred
there is a similar thing called relakks.com.
this service is run by the swedish pirate party and costs 5 $ per month. but they at least seem trustworthy.
xxx
Hehe, a swedish pirate party that “seem trustworthy.”
I’m a subscriber to Relakks and i’ve also tried this service from SecureIX. I can tell you that performance-wise, there is very little between them but BT works better with SecureIX with fewer dropped connections.
I would trust Relakks more with my data as they are outside of the US and have a clear policy on when they will release your information to authorities (if you are suspected of commiting an offense which carries a 2 year prison sentence in Sweden).
Although I have my doubts about the service’s credibility as well, they might be sending the password out in plaintext as a statement of their end-to-end SSL protection via email (the connection is from their server to you, it doesn’t go anywhere else). Then again, it could be complete incompetence/lack of thought. Not that I haven’t been using SSL with GMail for the last year over Hamachi [hamachi.cc], another encrypted VPN system. SecureIX’s service seems to use MPPE128 (Microsoft encryption scheme using RSA RC4, 128 bit) while Hamachi uses AES 256 bit-Chaining Block Cipher. Noted, with Hamachi you provide your own server, which will most likely severely limit speeds. SecureIX claims to provide a very large amount of secure bandwidth – I wonder how they can support the network load demanded by torrents? For free? No ads? Speeds through SecureIX will be interesting to observe. All in all, if you’re looking at the service for the VPN technology, my hat has to go off to Hamachi for being paranoid and doing it properly. So, the test for SecureIX will be to see how the VPN works from behind an institution’s firewall(s). After looking at the technical details of SecureIX’s services, I don’t think the users should to care too much about what is being transmitted – this service is mainly for packet camouflage and hopefully some identity masking.
There are a few companies out there that offer solutions for bandwidth shaping. Take a look at transfile.ca - a canadian company that offers remote torrent downloads right to a personal TrueCrypt encrypted image.
We provide a means to work around ISP traffic shaping. It’s assumed that users will use further encryption (file/pgp/ssl/etc..) on any service that needs extra security. We know that a good supercomputer could crack your traffic, but your average ISP can’t do it in real time, or even at all. Our logging is the bare minimum debugging information so can make sure there are no problems. I understand that you may not “trust” a third party, but we both know you don’t trust your existing ISP at all. We just add a layer of protection for your privacy.
Well, I’m trying it out, performance seems to pretty good. I’ll announce if I get any nasty letters from the RIAA etc.
@SIX - It would be helpful to know your motivations etc, thanks for what seems to be a fast and legit service so far
Quick lookup has the domain and address listed in Indiana
http://whois.domaintools.com/secureix.com
Reports on Nibble Networks:
http://www.cidr-report.org/cgi-bin/as-report?as=AS26234
And a very interseting article from what appears to be an associate of the Intercosmos Media Group, Inc., (”Intercosmos”)can be found here:
http://www.antichildporn.org/intercosmos.htm
It is very obvious the nature of the article but there is mention of their ability to search for any activity and pass it on the authorities - think I will refrain from using the service
Could this sort of service be used to get around the VoIP restrictions that countries like UAE have put into place, to protect the local telco revenue?
[quote comment="46215"]Quick lookup has the domain and address listed in Indiana
http://whois.domaintools.com/secureix.com
Reports on Nibble Networks:
http://www.cidr-report.org/cgi-bin/as-report?as=AS26234
And a very interseting article from what appears to be an associate of the Intercosmos Media Group, Inc., (”Intercosmos”)can be found here:
http://www.antichildporn.org/intercosmos.htm
It is very obvious the nature of the article but there is mention of their ability to search for any activity and pass it on the authorities - think I will refrain from using the service[/quote]
Uhh… I’ve checked out all your links and read the article and it appears Intercosmos is merely the registrar for the domain name and has no affiliation with Nibble or SecureIX.
Or am I missing something?
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