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BitTorrent Devs Introduce Comcast-Proof Encryption
Dean Garfield writes "An article at TorrentFreak notes that several BitTorrent developers have proposed a new protocol extension with the ability to bypass the BitTorrent interfering techniques used by Comcast and other ISPs. 'This new form of encryption will be implemented in BitTorrent clients including uTorrent, so Comcast subscribers are free to share again. The goal of this new type of encryption (or obfuscation) is to prevent ISPs from blocking or disrupting BitTorrent traffic connections that span between the receiver of a tracker response and any peer IP-port appearing in that tracker response, according to the proposal.'"
Unless one side suddenly blows away the other, I don't see this ending. It may breed innovation, but said innovation only seems useful for this one problem.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Too bad we even have to fight this forgery by Comcast, but a technical option has its advantages, since a legislative option might get watered down by lobbyists and congress.
Encryption is always a good thing. The more people that use encryption, the less eavesdropping there will be.
How about, "if you have nothing to hide, hide it anyways"?
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
That's nice, except that blocking encrypted protocols blocks quite a bit more than BitTorrent. . . Secure banking over SSL, SSH, VPNs, and a whole plethora of other protocols. Unless an ISP is willing to go from Internet Service Provider to Web Browsing Service Provider, it would be foolish to block encrypted protocols.
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Comcast will now probably simply impose soft traffic caps and soft caps on the number of connections users can make.
Well currently the state of the art is in favor of encryption, rather than cryptanalysis, so I don't think that the advantage is automatically Comcast's. They could probably do some fairly sophisticated traffic analysis, but at the end of the day, they're not actually going to break the encryption and get at the contents, and they can't block all encrypted traffic because it's too critical for other purposes.
They can force the BitTorrent devs to produce a new version every few months, but in the long run I think they're on the losing end of the war -- if they want to stay in the data-transportation business, and assuming there aren't any major breakthroughs in cryptanalysis that render modern public-key technologies useless.
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that's what the cableco's really want, they can easily oversubscribe the system when all you can do is browse the web and Email.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Secure banking still isn't going to look like BitTorrent under traffic analysis.
Now Comacast will need to keep a list of connections in order to guess that a torrent is running, instead of just looking at the packet. Good luck on that without a massive infrastructure upgrade.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Why not? Sure the connection between client and bank wouldnt, but what about between banks? thats a hell of a lot more data being transfered back and forth... not to mention that its sort of the same concept, a bunch of peers all sharing data, some already contain the same data, some dont...
But that doesnt mean I dont agree with you, with only banks specifically though, im sure they would have re-created the banks networks to avoid this dilemma... only that by traffic analysis alone, I could easily see it failing...
Banks dont use consumer grade internet connections to talk to each other.
I for one find anyone flaunting certification X to be an annoying twat
I think you may have missed the point of the GP post.
The point wasn't to block encrypted traffic just because it is encrypted. It would be to do traffic shaping, so that a connection generating dozens or hundreds of simultaneous encrypted connections to different destination IP's might be targeted; it is a traffic pattern would most likely be generated by a P2P program and not by normal internet use by a family.
Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice doggie!" until you can find a rock.
If they aren't already doing it (I dont know the exact technical details of what they are doing), ISPs like Comcast will simply start looking for anyone uploading large amounts of data (especially if they are uploading to a bunch of different people at once) and block that.
I'm surprised it took this long for the Bittorrent Devs to respond. Encryption is not a complete solution, as I have stated before, but it is a beginning. That is for certain .
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It's going to get a lot more interesting from here on out. In the end, it will only benefit the consumers since they will receive technology that allows them to communicate a little more privately, and perhaps with a little luck, more anonymously too. One could only hope that TOR/Freenet technologies become as ubiquitous in their use as email. Perhaps a hybrid system with elements of Freenet, TOR, and Bittorrent all wrapped up into one would do the trick. I certainly think so.
I think, actually I know, that Comcast has fired the first shot in a losing battle.
I also just can't help pointing out the similarities to the Drug War. A million or so people in prison, and yet there are still plenty of users and suppliers. I would almost say it has effectively made no difference in the amount of people using drugs, or selling them. Especially, since the amount of drugs being sold and used in prisons is even higher then on the street.
So what is the point? If history has taught us anything, it is that governments (corporations even more so) will consistently fail at their attempts to limit/eliminate popular behavior. The elements may change from time to time, but the end result is always the same. The people will find a way to continue their behavior
"Greetings, Professor Falken. Strange game. The only winning move is not to play."
One of the things I'm curious about is what kind of collateral damage this kind of thing does to legitimate traffic. Oddly enough, I couldn't get to expedia.com, transformers.com (hey, I have an eight-year-old), and store.apple.com when I first got Comcast. A couple of months later, when the news first broke that they were screwing with the traffic, those sites suddenly started working. Nothing changed at my house, and all of them started working at once.
Possibly coincidence. Possibly not.
i would argument there is no such thing as "normal" internet use. it's a very personal thing that no 2 people are likely to do the same.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
This is anecdotal at best, but here goes:
Most of the best IT people I've ever worked with have no certs.
Most of the worst IT people I've ever worked with have one or more certs.
Go figure.
Why does BitTorrent use TCP at all? If it used UDP, there would be many ways to detect and ignore forged packets.
Non-trivial applications are almost always better off managing their own connection state in my experience. A lot of TCP/IP networking code seems to be written to work around the quirks of TCP connections rather than to take advantage of them. UDP is clearly the better choice in cases like this.
Isn't that the very defenition of P2P to begin with? What needs reengineering about it?
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
Uhm, only in the case of financial bilateral peering agreements. Don't misunderstand the overall problem - its financial - with other issues such as "network capacity", "available upstream bandwidth on the DOCSIS cable modem infrastructure" and similar issues.
Even massive amounts of P2P between their clients, not ever leaving their network, costs them money.
Adrian
(No CCIE, but I've been working with SP networks of sorts since 1997.)
How do they detect encryption?
If it's the entropy, jpg and bzipped files have similar entropy too.
Are they interfering with those downloads as well?
How about https?
If they ever do manage to completely block P2P then they might find themselves looking at a bunch of customers who only want 300kbit connections instead of 20mbits. What are they going to do? Slash their prices to the same as the small ISPs who can offer cheaper/slower connections? I think not.
No sig today...