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Date:      Tue, 25 Jan 2005 14:48:17 -0500
From:      Chuck Swiger <cswiger@mac.com>
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Bittorrent secure?
Message-ID:  <41F6A281.8030601@mac.com>
In-Reply-To: <20050125192253.GA3088@gicco.homeip.net>
References:  <20050125192253.GA3088@gicco.homeip.net>

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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



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