libtorrent-2.0 has just been released with a few major new features. One of them is support for BitTorrent v2. Most of the specification work of BEP 52 was done by the8472. The libtorrent support for bittorrent v2 was mostly implemented by Steven Siloti. BiglyBT also has an implementation of BitTorrent v2 to be released in . . .
This post is a result of looking into a slow-start performance issue in uTP. Slow-start is a mechanism in TCP employed to discover the capacity of a link, before transitioning into the steady state regime of additive increase and multiplicative decrease. Slow start is employed on new connections and after time-outs (where the congestion window . . .
I’ve been working on performance improvements of the DHT recently that I would like to cover in this post. NICE routing table One of the proposed improvements from the sub-seconds lookups paper is referred to as NICE. It proposes replacing the method of maintaining the routing table buckets (see kademlia paper) with directly pinging the nodes, the most . . .
In bittorrent it is important to keep the swarm as evenly connected as possible. Clustering of peers may create bottlenecks for piece distribution and create a skewed market for trading pieces. Keep in mind that local piece availability is used as an approximation for global piece availability in the rarest-first piece picking algorithm. This post . . .
One of the vulnerabilities of typical DHTs, in particular the bittorrent DHT, is the fact that participants can choose their own node ID. This enables an attacker to deliberately place themselves at a locaton in the DHT where they know they will be responsible for storing some specific data. At that point, there are a few naughty things . . .
Running bittorrent over SSL could make sense for several applications. Anything you want distributed to a closed group, but large enough to warrant bittorrent would do well being distributed over bittorrent/SSL. Currently closed group distributions either don’t use any peer-to-peer distribution at all, or they use poor-man’s privacy/security. I’m referring to the “private” flag of . . .
Deciding how many outstanding requests to keep to peers typically is based on the bandwidth delay product, or a simplified model thereof. The bandwidth delay product is the bandwidth capacity of a link multiplied by the latency of the link. It represents the number of bytes that fit in the wire and buffers along the . . .
timing out requests, and requesting blocks from other peers, may seem like a straight forward and trivial problem. However, there’s a balance to be struck between timing out a block too early, causing certain situation to systematically request every block multiple times, or never timing blocks out causing partially downloaded pieces to linger for a . . .
banning peers sending corrupt data Bittorrent lets you verify data you receive from the swarm against the SHA-1 hashes in the .torrent file. This enable clients to ban peers that sends data that fails the hash check, and thus cannot be trusted. However, the integrity checking can only be done at piece level. A piece . . .