Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 21:58:19 +0100 From: Hanspeter Roth <hampi@rootshell.be> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Bittorrent secure? Message-ID: <20050125205819.GA3574@gicco.homeip.net> In-Reply-To: <41F6A281.8030601@mac.com> References: <20050125192253.GA3088@gicco.homeip.net> <41F6A281.8030601@mac.com>
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On Jan 25 at 14:48, Chuck Swiger spoke: > 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. That to say I should download CHECKSUM.MD5 from one of the public FTP-servers by hand and do the MD5 checks myself, right? > 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. BitTorrent doesn't get some public checksums from some public servers transparently, does it? > On the other hand, Torrent doesn't do any worse than FTP or HTTP. The FTP-servers should be more or less official and should contain more or less uncompromised data. Hosts that offer BitTorrent probably are less official. -Hanspeter
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