61–70 of 114 posts
Pity we will never see a genuine version of uTorrent that will support it. That was a real loss.
Sorry I am not sure why is that. Would you mind explaining?
Now it's full of ads and performs poorly.
[1] Like all the different Linux distro install images over and over again.
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SHA256 was chosen over SHA512 because the two most popular 64-bit ISAs (x86-64 and ARMv8) both define instruction extensions to provide hardware acceleration of SHA256. Hardware support makes SHA256 much faster than SHA512 in software, even on 64-bit processors.
Huh, I didn't know that's the case for x86. My quick search suggests that support is still quite limited though, and none of my HW (1~4 yrs old) support it. I suppose by the time the spec is finalized and widely adopted HW-accelerated SHA256 would be, too (and I should switch my zfs checksum back from SHA512/256 to SHA256).
This update to the spec is a modest change that's largely a preemptive reaction to SHA1 being broken; large portions of BitTorrent are designed around the 20-byte length of a SHA1 checksum. They've decided to move forward with SHA256 truncated to 20 bytes to avoid incompatibilities with existing infrastructure such as the Mainline DHT. Beyond the hashing algorithm, some important additions that were previously propos…
I'd love to see a p2p wikipedia and a p2p twitter alternative Moving bittorrent away from it's present image could be achieved by making p2p useful beyond bluray rips
But I just used it a lot when running bigger downloads like install discs for Linux distros, OpenOffice etc., and it made a difference when there was some major release and half of the plain old http mirrors were painfully slow or down entirely. Admittedly, that situation got a lot better compared to 10 years ago, but still I'm delighted by how natural it felt to use, since it seamlessly integrated with the browser's download manager. And you didn't have this "uh, I need to start an external program for this" kind of reluctant thought when you saw a website offered download via torrent. Today I just wonder if BT would have evolved differently if all browsers would have included a client.
This update to the spec is a modest change that's largely a preemptive reaction to SHA1 being broken; large portions of BitTorrent are designed around the 20-byte length of a SHA1 checksum. They've decided to move forward with SHA256 truncated to 20 bytes to avoid incompatibilities with existing infrastructure such as the Mainline DHT. Beyond the hashing algorithm, some important additions that were previously propos…
SHA256 truncated to 20 bytes What are the security implications of doing this? It seems it wouldn't increase the strength beyond the original 160 bits, no? Was there anything preventing redesigning the protocol to use full 32-byte SHA256 hashes throughout?
80-bit of collision resistance is usually the number accepted for legacy cryptosystems or for lightweight crypto. It's not great but it's not "too bad".
By removing 96 bits from the state you also prevent length extension attacks (which SHA-256 is vulnerable to, see [1]). Or rather, provide 96-bit of security against them. Which should be enough.
This is better than using SHA-1 because SHA-1 has "efficient" chosen-prefix algorithms to find collisions while SHA-2 currently does not.
Now if it were me I would have chosen a hash function like KangarooTwelve which is faster, provides parallelization for large inputs, allows you to customize the output length and has received a substantial amount of cryptanalysis.
[1]: https://cryptologie.net/article/417/how-did-length-extension...
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I haven't found any Intel hardware with the SHA extensions actually implemented. I was expecting it in Skylake but apparently that's not the case... Not sure when we can expect to see them.
Intel has recently implemented SHA1 in hardware. So give it another decade or so.
1) Chunks don't span files . Each file is validated by the hash of its merkle tree. This is the biggest user-visible change, since it means you can download one file without downloading others. 2) SHA1 is replaced with SHA2-256 (2x longer hashes and not broken). 3) Files are represented by a tree structure instead of a list of dictionaries with paths-- this reduces duplication in deeply-nested hierarchies. 4) Backwar…
> Chunks don't span files. Each file is validated by the hash of its merkle tree. This is the biggest user-visible change, since it means you can download one file without downloading others. But can't you already download one file? I suppose if a chunk spans two files, you may get a few extra KB of another file you don't want, but it's not noticeable from a user perspective.
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SHA256 truncated to 20 bytes What are the security implications of doing this? It seems it wouldn't increase the strength beyond the original 160 bits, no? Was there anything preventing redesigning the protocol to use full 32-byte SHA256 hashes throughout?
SHA-256 has a 256-bit output. Truncated to 20 bytes/160-bit you effectively reduce the collision resistance to 80-bit and the (second) pre-image resistance to 160-bit. (This mean for example that you have to do around 2^80 operations (hash computations) to find a collision.) 80-bit of collision resistance is usually the number accepted for legacy cryptosystems or for lightweight crypto. It's not great but it's not "t…
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I'd love to see a p2p wikipedia and a p2p twitter alternative Moving bittorrent away from it's present image could be achieved by making p2p useful beyond bluray rips
I liked how the old Opera included a bittorrent client. It was the only browser that did, and felt like it was actually the way it was meant to be used. But nobody got it. You had warez kiddies left and right complaining how it sucked compared to Azureus and later µTorrent which had bazillions of features to tweak and max out their connection, or saying it was useless because their favorite ALT did not whitelist Oper…
There's plenty of things besides piracy people could be doing with torrents and related tech and it seems like such a waste of an idea. A Linux package manager, an open-source Acestream alternative, collaborative work on large scales
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We have plenty of good open source alternatives now. qTorrent works fine
Thanks I haven't hear of that. And it is written in C++ which is nice. Is it considered the spiritual successor to the original uTorrent?
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I'd love to see a p2p wikipedia and a p2p twitter alternative Moving bittorrent away from it's present image could be achieved by making p2p useful beyond bluray rips
I liked how the old Opera included a bittorrent client. It was the only browser that did, and felt like it was actually the way it was meant to be used. But nobody got it. You had warez kiddies left and right complaining how it sucked compared to Azureus and later µTorrent which had bazillions of features to tweak and max out their connection, or saying it was useless because their favorite ALT did not whitelist Oper…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser) https://brave.com/