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Ratio Vulnerability in BitTorrent Discovered
An anonymous reader writes "The "vulnerability" has been tested on all the major torrent trackers that use the torrentbits source code. The idea is that you will sniff your torrent info using the HTTP Analyzer and with Firefox you will update your stats to the tracker being identified as a client."
There are any number of parties who will headline "Vulnerability in BitTorrent!" and cound on most readers never bothering to get the facts.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
As much as many people will ask if disclosure was a good idea in this case, it's important to remember that if one person can find this vulnerability and make it public, an unknown number of people could have found it and be making use of it in the background. The functionality of BitTorrent depends on clients seeding copies of the file back into the network after having downloaded, and a vulnerability like this in a significant amount of trackers could easily cause serious damage to the operation of many torrents.
Business Voyeur
According to the IE7 thread, the only way to force fixes is by disclosing vulnerabilities. Goose, gander etc I suppose
Unpretentious Sydney reviews by unqualified Sydney reviewers
I would imagine that setting up a small script that bumps up your uploaded amount by a few hundred MB every now and then would be very hard to detect. Certainly more difficult than spotting someone who just uploaded 10GB out of nowhere (as in the example).
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
Actually, this is a common concern among security folks. "If we announce a bug, those who don't patch are going to get pwned."
Only security researchers generally don't use the term "pwned" in their press releases...
I'm going to be a bit vitriolic, but you deseve it.
Was it really a good thing to make this public?
Yes, it was. This way, all people will know about the vulnerability, and we can get around to design something better - instead of it spreading among leachers and not to the general population.
Won't this cause a new wave of leechers?
That's part of the idea. Bittorrent is an open protocol, and when everyone knows about the vulnerability - it's a tad more pressure on various developers to remove the design flaws.
A lot of trackers are built on torrentbits.
So fucking what? Do you want to tell mother nature not to send a hurricane against New Orleans, because it will be a disaster? No, you won't.
What you will do, on the other hand, is try to design something that works. If it doesn't work, it's back to the drawing board. Keeping silent is what companies such as microsoft think is a good idea. It is not. It's a hellish bad idea. You'll have various scum abusing the vulnerability without everyone knowing about it. You'll have admins having these kind of thing biting them in the ass without being prepared for it.
Publishing this kind of information, even though when it's a deep design flaw in the trackers such as this, makes it easier to cooperate and eliminate the fuckups. Keeping silent about it doesn't do any good at all.
Did you know that various worms abused sendmails "debug" command in eariler years? And that it gave you a root-shell on the mailserver? No? Well, it wasn't very smart - and a lot of people knew about it, without giving it much publicity. It was way larger than this idiotic flaw, but it was your idiotic idea about 'shutting up about it' that caused the havoc.
One should always disclose security flaws. No exception. Even though if hundreds of millions will be caught in the middle. It's the only way to ensure that it'll be fixed, and that everyone will know about it - at least everyone that cares enough to follow the news.
Now onto an idea on how to fix this garbage. It's not a bug in the bittorrent protocol, as it won't affect how much various people send to eachother. It'll mainly affect statistics on various sites, and whether you will be banned or not. Personally I think the solution is for every client to upload how much their peers have sent them - and for the peers to check that amount. Think of it as 'trusted third party'. If any of the peers disagree too much about the amount over time, they discontinue talking to each other - and the client that disagrees logs an 'objection' with the torrent-server. If we're talking several gigabytes of data, it should be very easy to spot by the administrators. Especially if it's the same peer that gets flak all the time.
Of course, this will be problematic when you think about NAT's, as various computers behind NAT-devices will check their internal IP, and not the external one. That, however, is not the responsibility of the trusted third party, but the responsibility of the peer. Unfortunately this will make things more difficult, but hell, it's a tradeoff in any case. This might be solved through in-band communication with peers telling each other who they think the other party is.
Ahwell. Enough ranting.
I would think that the vast majority of folks using BT to get "legitimate" downloads won't be using this hack (I must get this Knoppix ISO and not share!). Really, it just exploits the greed of the pirate community, for which I have little sympathy.
What a wanking piece of haughty, uninformed bullshit! How this got modded up to +4 is beyond me. Bram Cohen has realized this from the beginning, and all client authors understand it as well. The design of the BitTorrent protocol is and always has been grounded in the economic principles of the free market. Seeding requirements are *not* enforced in the official client or tracker. Clients only upload to people who upload to them, and if people break their agreements they *do* get banned.
Your suggestion requiring uploads to seeds is stupid, because people would be even *less* likely to seed if it wasted their download bandwidth as well as their upload bandwidth (and twice as much of it too!). If you want to discourage downloads from seeds, simply make the seeds slow.
The idea of assigning economic values to individual pieces is already in the protocol implicitly; the economic value of a piece is inversely proportional to the number of clients who have it. If you have a piece nobody else does, you can upload it to anyone and get a piece in return, therefore that piece has high value. If everybody else has the piece, nobody will accept it in a trade. Therefore it's already in a client's best interest to grab the most rare pieces; additional incentive for this is not necessary.
If you have such awesome ideas about how to build a BitTorrent client that no one else does, then why don't you build one yourself and change the world? It's not that difficult; the protocol is simple by design. Otherwise, shut your trap about how stupid the people actually working on clients are.
The people who are not acting like a free market here are the writers of the *trackers* which trust reported uploads by clients (clients never trust these numbers for anything useful). Your entire rant is misguided and off-base; it should be aimed at the writers and users of ratio trackers, not the clients.
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