[tor-talk] About time to make BitTorrent work over Tor,

[grarpamp]

On 8/30/13, Jan-Frode Myklebust <janfrode at tanso.net> wrote:
>> > On Mon, Aug 26, 2013 at 2:46 PM, Nathan Suchy
>> >> I don't want this for piracy as I have a paid VPN account that is much
>> >> faster for that if I decide to pirate. I think we need BitTorrent
>> >> though
>> >> to
>> >> work on Tor so Tor Users can securely share files with one another.

>> > AFAIK the most obvious issue with this (among more subtle side-channel
>> > attack / decloaking problems) is network scalability. Total relay
>> > bandwidth
>> > available is, while seemingly increasing in general, very limited given
>> > such use cases. [1]
>> > How does one scale BitTorrent on top of that?

> By adding TOR exit-node functionality into the bittorrent clients, and
> giving bittorrent credit score to clients with lots of TOR-traffic. That
> would scale the TOR network ...

Tor does not currently scale as simply as that. Therefore whatever
you try to scale on top of Tor will not scale either. All using exits will
do (roughly speaking) is cause Tor to fail 1/2 as fast as using the
purely internal approach would. BT is further badly hampered since
UDP and inbound bindings are unavailable under the current exit model.

Tor's design is generally "move a lot of browsers over a few exits",
anything else is bonus, at least historically. At the moment, if you're
trying to move to millions of p2p users, not just hundreds of tinkerers,
you're better off enhancing Tor first or writing or finding another secure
transport that scales better. Then moving it all off the clearnet once and
for all. But that appears to be beyond the typical scope of thinking in the
BT space, you know, because it's not fast and it's sooo harrrddddd man.

Tor is good stuff, but like anything else, only good when used within
its model. Supposedly i2p welcomes torrenting. Millions? Ask i2p.

> ... and also give plausible deniability to
> direct downloads ("wasn't me, it was the TOR exit" ;-)

No, not really.