Re: Security concerning Tor, BitTorrent and Firewall

[Arrakis <arrakistor@xxxxxxxxx>]

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