afaik RC4 was not intended for security, but to obscure traffic from ISPs. it's not effective for this purpose either in wake of Deep Packet Inspection.
You need to raise this issue at Bittorrent Enhancement Proposal level and find good arguments that haven't been voiced before.
by
Anoid on 2025/05/20 06:51:41 PM
I am not a participant with Bittorrent Enhancement Proposal
I use Tixati so maybe the developer can do something with the system to secure torrents from fakes and other malicious parties
RSA seems to be solid to secure a session, RSA 2048 is maybe fine but RSA 4096 is more robust. Then using SHA3 to check pieces is pretty standard but even the old MD5 can check blocks fairly adequately.
A robust P2P session makes the troll unhappy as they cannot intercept and ready the messages.
by Guest on 2025/10/30 06:00:20 PM
Anoid,
Please don't take this the wrong way, but I think you misunderstand what is happening with the Torrent protocol here. Please don't take any offense. I'm happy to explain:
Early 2000-2010 people would Torrent, but ISP bandwidth got unmanageable because of the massive traffic increases in popularity and the copywrong 'trolls' were too stupid to know internet existed back then anyway.
What ISP's did was snoop, not for causing you trouble or watching your activity, they probably didn't care as long as you paid your bill, but they needed savings on their own bandwidth costs getting out of control.
Original versions of Torrent protocol was "in the clear" meaning no encryption, so ISP installed machines called DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) they had the capability to insert packets like RST messages.
If two Torrent clients were transferring files then one ISP says STOP (injecting "RST" command) so the files transfer would immediate drop the connection and no bandwidth used (success for ISP)
This is a classic MITM style attack (Man In The Middle) They kept doing this and it was difficult to send data because of ISP THROTTLING of bandwidth and ISP injecting random reset commands - meaning a deliberate repeated break in comms designed purely to slow you down.
This was deemed hostile to P2P traffic so the designers of the protocol used RC4 encryption. It really doesn't matter AT ALL how "secure" this encryption is. It makes NO difference. Really it doesn't.
It just prevented the ISP from injecting RST reset packets identifying P2P. With RC4 all the ISP see is random data. Now the RST inject machine is considered "defeated". That's pretty much all it does.
Both torrent clients know what the RC4 key is, but the ISP doesn't so its defeated. It's not supposed to be a secure thing, it only needs to trick the Deep Packet Inspection dataflow process.
If you want to talk about the other trolls, we will have to do that over RC4 encrypted messages on here :-D