Privacy In BitTorrent By Hiding In the Crowd

pinguin-geek writes "Researchers at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University have identified a new 'guilt-by-association' threat to privacy in peer-to-peer (P2P) systems that would enable an eavesdropper to accurately classify groups of users with similar download behavior. While many have pointed out that the data exchanged over these connections can reveal personal information about users, the researchers shows that only the patterns of connections — not the data itself — is sufficient to create a powerful threat to user privacy. To thwart this threat, they have released SwarmScreen, a publicly available, open source software that restores privacy by masking a user's real download activity in such a manner as to disrupt classification."

Comments

Re:Deluge?

[perryizgr8]

Do not use TOR in that manner. The designers have said that it was never intended to handle P2P traffic, and some exit nodes even go far enough to try to filter the traffic out to prevent this kind of abuse.

what harm does tor do when used with bittorrent?