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PSA: Don't torrent over TOR

tor.stackexchange.com How can BitTorrent traffic be anonymized with Tor?

This blog post from a few years ago suggests that using BitTorrent services over Tor is a bad idea for multiple reasons. However, it also suggests some fixes to get over these problems. Is using a

How can BitTorrent traffic be anonymized with Tor?
  1. It doesn't make you anonymous. Torrent protocol wasn't designed with anonymity in mind and there are a million ways you're going to leak your actual IP address.
  2. Tor is a TCP only network.
  3. While this doesn't give you the anonymity you wanted, it will hurt the network for other users.
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  • No, that's not how I2P works.

    First, let's start with the basics. An exit node is a node which interfaces between the encrypted network (I2P or Tor) and the regular Internet. A user attempting to access a regular Internet site over I2P or Tor would route their traffic through the encrypted network to an exit node, which then sends the request over the Internet without the I2P/Tor encryption. Responses follow the reverse path back to the user. Nodes which only establish encrypted connections to other I2P or Tor nodes, including ones used for internal (onion) routing, are not exit nodes.

    Both I2P and Tor support the creation of services hosted directly through the encrypted network. In Tor these are referred to as onion services and are accessed through *.onion hostnames. In I2P these internal services (*.i2p or *.b32) are the only kind of service the protocol directly supports—though you can configure a specific I2P service linked to a HTTP/HTTPS proxy to handle non-I2P URLs in the client configuration. There are only a few such proxy services as this is not how I2P is primarily intended to be used.

    Tor, by contrast, has built-in support for exit nodes. Routing traffic anonymously from Tor users to the Internet is the original model for the Tor network; onion services were added later. There is no need to choose an exit node in Tor—the system maintains a list and picks one automatically. Becoming a Tor exit node is a simple matter of enabling an option in the settings, whereas in I2P you would need to manually configure a proxy server, inform others about it, and have them adjust their proxy configuration to use it.

    If you set up an I2P node and do not go out of your way to expose a HTTP/HTTPS proxy as an I2P service then no traffic from the I2P network can be routed to non-I2P destinations via your node. This is equivalent to running a Tor internal, non-exit node, possibly hosting one or more onion services.

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