Security concerning Tor, BitTorrent and Firewall
Arrakis
arrakistor at gmail.com
Mon Feb 19 19:52:36 UTC 2007
Arand,
I doubt you will find anyone who wants to help you steal bandwidth
from tor so you can abuse it by downloading torrents. You would be
better to stick to a commercial service.
Regards,
Arrakis
> USING:
> Tor & Privoxy & Vidalia bundle 0.1.1.26
> Windows XP Home
> µTorrent
> 3com firewall
> HAPPENINGS:
> I am using Tor behind a 3com firewall, in connection with µTorrent.
> Before using Tor I -naturally, having not opened any ports on the
> firewall- experienced low connection (up&down) rates in µTorrent. However,
> after installing the Tor bundle and configuring µTorrent for use with the
> Tor proxy server (as described at
> http://wiki.noreply.org/noreply/TheOnionRouter/TorifyHOWTO#head-0d047b05e9b
> 93c23cec9198550816a114012bde0), I suddenly experienced connection speeds
> which would equal those, had I used a normal port forward on my firewall.
> QUESTIONS:
> Firstly, how does this work?
> Secondly -on account of a port forward always being a security risk- Is
> this a similar security risk?
> And lastly, if it is indeed a security risk (no matter how small), does
> this apply to other programs than BitTorrent clients, using the Tor proxy
> server?
> __________
> I first inquired with the Privoxy about this issue (presuming that it
> was related to Privoxy) and I recieved the following response:
>> --- Date: 2007-02-19 13:17 Sender: fabiankeil </users/fabiankeil/> ---
>> Are you sure that your provider doesn't throttle BitTorrent traffic?
>> By using Tor you prevent your ISP from knowing which services (other
>> than Tor itself) you're using and this could explain why using Tor
>> speeds up your BitTorrent traffic (it's no longer rate limited by your
>> ISP). Privoxy itself is unlikely to have anything to do with it and I
>> don't think port forwarding has anything to do with it either, but I'm
>> not familiar with BitTorrent. The short answer to your last questions
>> is "No", but as it has nothing to do with Privoxy you should checkout
>> the Tor documentation for details and ask again on the or-talk mailing
>> list if you have further questions.
> I am fairly certain that my ISP is not the issue here, so I remain
> puzzled... And I've so far not found any answers in the Tor documentation.
> Anybody got something on this?
> - Arand
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