From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Tue Jan 25 19:48:41 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5968A16A4CE for ; Tue, 25 Jan 2005 19:48:41 +0000 (GMT) Received: from pi.codefab.com (pi.codefab.com [199.103.21.227]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1EAF643D48 for ; Tue, 25 Jan 2005 19:48:41 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from cswiger@mac.com) Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by pi.codefab.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6AA225EF2 for ; Tue, 25 Jan 2005 14:48:40 -0500 (EST) Received: from pi.codefab.com ([127.0.0.1]) by localhost (pi.codefab.com [127.0.0.1]) (amavisd-new, port 10024) with ESMTP id 53149-03 for ; Tue, 25 Jan 2005 14:48:39 -0500 (EST) Received: from [192.168.1.3] (pool-68-160-236-186.ny325.east.verizon.net [68.160.236.186]) by pi.codefab.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0E8345EF0 for ; Tue, 25 Jan 2005 14:48:38 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <41F6A281.8030601@mac.com> Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 14:48:17 -0500 From: Chuck Swiger Organization: The Courts of Chaos User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041217 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org References: <20050125192253.GA3088@gicco.homeip.net> In-Reply-To: <20050125192253.GA3088@gicco.homeip.net> X-Enigmail-Version: 0.90.0.0 X-Enigmail-Supports: pgp-inline, pgp-mime Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Virus-Scanned: amavisd-new at codefab.com Subject: Re: Bittorrent secure? X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 19:48:41 -0000 Hanspeter Roth wrote: > how secure is Bittorrent? It's not secure. > How can one know how trustworthy the stuff > downloaded from other Bittorrent fellows is? You need to have an external source of information which specifies a checksum or MD5 hash to confirm that the file has not been tampered with. If you trust the Torrent tracker file, then BitTorrent has this part built-in. Otherwise, you would use something like the distinfo files in /usr/ports to help confirm the validity of files. On the other hand, Torrent doesn't do any worse than FTP or HTTP. -- -Chuck