Anomos - anonymous bit torrent - using Onion Routing...

[Anthony G. Basile]

On 11/10/2010 02:03 AM, grarpamp wrote:
> "we have created a platform where by no party outside of the trusted
> tracker will have any information about who a peer is or what they are
> downloading"
> 
> There are many issues with this. Just an FYI re Anomos.
> 
> On 11/9/10, Kyle Williams <kyle.kwilliams at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 11:21 AM, John M. Schanck <jms07 at hampshire.edu>wrote:
>>
>>> On Tue, Nov 09, 2010 at 04:55:06PM +0000, Cav wrote:
>>>> Hi Or-Dev,
>>>>
>>>> I have stumbled across this torrent client. My first thoughts, upon
>>>> seeing Onion Routing in the description, was wondering if this is
>>>> using the Tor network.
>>>> I have included a link and some details about this torrent client below.
>>>>
>>>> In which case, does this then mean its likely to clobber the Tor
>>>> network with p2p traffic ? - this bodes ill for Tor servers ?
>>>> Does anyone have any thoughts ?
>>>> [snip]
>>>
>>> Hi Cav,
>>>
>>> I'm an Anomos developer so hopefully I can answer your questions :).
>>> Anomos does not rely on the Tor network in any way. The blog does
>>> suggest that clients could use Tor to make their announce requests, but
>>> that functionality isn't built into Anomos directly.
>>
>>
>> It is important to note that the many torrent clients report their real IP
>> address to the tracker through the announcement of the torrent.  This is so
>> other torrent clients can send request to the client that issued the
>> announce to the tracker.  Anyone who has run an exit node and observed
>> torrent exit traffic.  Bottom line, it's not anonymous if the client reports
>> to the tracker correctly.
>>
>>
>>> Even if users chose
>>> to announce over Tor, it would amount, at most, to a few small HTTPS
>>> requests per client per hour. The file transfers themselves are done
>>> entirely peer-to-peer, with clients connected to the same tracker
>>> serving as relays for each other. So, Anomos certainly wouldn't clobber
>>> the Tor network, and ideally it would alleviate some of the load on Tor
>>> by drawing BitTorrent users off of it.
>>>
>>> -John
>>>
>>

If the torrent client is on a box behind a NAT on a private IP address,
and it is firewalled in such a way that only tor traffic can exit the
box, there is no way the torrent client can possible obtain the external IP.

Nonetheless, there are other reasons why one should not use bittorrent
over tor, not the least of which is that it is a bandwidth hog.

-- 
Anthony G. Basile, Ph. D.
Chair of Information Technology
D'Youville College
Buffalo, NY 14201
(716) 829-8197