If I use Tor torrenting i.e use tor for downloading torrents, will it guarantee me anonymity?

612    Asked by AnnaBall in SQL Server , Asked on Dec 14, 2021

 Will I be shown as an anonymous user by Tor or will my peers, with whom I'll share a torrent will be able to see my IP Address? 

While trying to find out about privacy policies of Tor, I found an article saying -

Tor is a free anti censorship tool, designed to help people around the world communicate safely and access content without restrictions. At its core is a series of encrypted proxies, which are routed randomly and layered like an onion. The theory is that if you tunnel your internet traffic through three or more encrypted proxies, the 1st layer will know your identity, the last layer will know your destination, but no one will be able to connect the two.

All Tor proxy nodes are run by volunteers, and the entire network is based on a theory that all Tor node operators are trustworthy (which is unlikely). Even so, Tor is still highly secure, and anonymous.

Answered by Anisha Dalal

Tor torrenting is the common way through which many people get caught.


So what's the fix? There are two answers here. The first answer is "don't run Bittorrent over Tor". We've been saying for years not to run Bittorrent over Tor, because the Tor network can't handle the load

The second answer is that if you want your Bittorrent client to actually provide privacy when using a proxy, you need to get the application and protocol developers to fix their applications and protocols. Tor can't keep you safe if your applications leak your identity. The third attack from their paper is where things get interesting. For efficiency, Tor puts multiple application streams over each circuit.[...]

What's the fix? The same two fixes as before: don't run Bittorrent over Tor, and/or get your Bittorrent developers to fix their applications. But for developers, this attack opens up an opportunity for a third fix. Is there a way that we as Tor can reduce the damage that users can do to themselves when they use insecure applications over Tor? We can't solve the fact that you'll shoot yourself in the foot if you use Bittorrent over Tor, but maybe we can still save the rest of the leg. One approach to addressing this problem in Tor's design is to make each user application use a separate circuit. Another answer is to separate streams by destination port. Then all the streams that go to port 80 are on one circuit, and a stream for a different destination port goes on another circuit.

We've had that idea lurking in the background for a long time now, but it's actually because of Bittorrent that we haven't implemented it: if a BT client asks us to make 50 streams to 50 different destination ports, I don't want the Tor client to try to make 50 different circuits. That puts too much load on the network. I guess we could special-case it by separating "80" and "not 80", but I'm not sure how effective that would be in practice, first since many other ports (IM, SSH, etc) would want to be special-cased, and second since firewalls are pressuring more and more of the Internet to go over port 80 these days.



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