Azureus Creators on End-to-End Encryption

said by vpoko:

With ISP's apparantly lining up to suck up to law enforcement, it may not be a bad idea to use end-to-end encryption on your downloads anyway.

said by verolom:

There is such a notion of security through obscurity.

said by verolom:

If it takes time to decrypt a bunch of files and only few of them are of interest, it will be hard to find them and the entity looking might lose interest or not be able to look at that many files. Now, without an encryption, it is very easy to find them.

said by nixen:

Technically, not really "security through obscurity".

The computers at the disposal of those who have access to your records can make relatively short work of your encryption. This is particularly so if you don't use a unique encryption per file. That is, once they break your encryption key(s), busting the rest of your data is relatively trivial.

-tom

said by vpoko:

Are you saying that commercial, strong-key encryption is trivial to break? I'm not challenging you, I only have cursory knowledge of cryptology, but I thought we have algorithms that are (at least today) pretty secure.

said by nixen:

However, as long as you use a security model that is not flawed to begin with, not even the government can brute force it at this time. It's just not plausible. Here is a quote about AES, which is what the US Government currently uses for the most part:

Some cryptographers worry about the security of AES. They feel that the margin between the number of rounds specified in the cipher and the best known attacks is too small for comfort. The risk is that some way to improve these attacks might be found and that, if so, the cipher could be broken. In this meaning, a cryptographic "break" is anything faster than an exhaustive search, so an attack against 128-bit key AES requiring 'only' 2120 operations would be considered a break even though it would be, now, quite infeasible. In practical application, any break of AES which is only this 'good' would be irrelevant. For the moment, such concerns can be ignored. The largest publicly-known brute-force attack has been against a 64 bit RC5 key by distributed.net (finishing in 2002; Moore's Law implies that this is roughly equivalent to an attack on a 66-bit key today).

So yeah, I wouldn't worry about encryption being broken yet.

said by verolom:

There is such a notion of security through obscurity....

said by firefox:

I thought "security through obscurity" was one of the tenants of what not to follow. I'm sure I heard that from a seminar a few years back.

said by russotto:

Encryption buys you one other thing besides a delay: It means that if they want _you_, they have to go after _you_ specifically. They can't just cast a wide net and bring in all the fishies they can find.

said by superht1:

It is not because they lack bandwidth but because they want to destroy p2p, the right to trade files with other users.

said by superht1:

Upload is often not saturated, it's the download that are since it's heavily used. Heeeeee. Wakeup and smell a breathe of truth.

said by keyboard5684:

What is the problem with waiting a little longer for a non-important music file or linux image and allowing other usage like VOIP and http traffic to operate better?

said by Bill:

If people start downloading at full speed again, what's the point? The ISP will probably just put a monthly usage cap on the service.

Now you're back to the same place you started before encryption...

said by gatorkram:

The thing that everyone is missing, or not talking about, is the encryption in azureus, and uTorrent, offer you no protection what-so-ever

said by lordkuri:

And the thing you seem to be missing is that no one has stated that it's "to protect you". This is wholly intended to get around shaping proxies that filter based on packet headers and/or protocol.

said by macrospect:

As other users have mentioned this will only slow BT traffic not stop. Sooner or later ISP's will find a way around the encryption. Its just a matter of time (just like everything else dealing with P2P).

said by Cheeze It9:

Is there software/hardware that can do that automatically ??

I'm just curious is all....the only exposure in the "hands on" networking parts is the Cisco IOS that I am aware of and on that all of the bit-capping was a manual ordeal...