Do not use Port 24032 for P2P

Any ISP worth its salt should do packet inspection and traffic analysis instead of simple port monitoring.

Chris

Am Thu, 23 Oct 2008 14:06:43 +0100 schrieb Chris Davies:

if they have to they do (pattern matching)

X-No-Archive: Yes

Of course, a good encryption system can defeat traffic analysis.

Am Thu, 23 Oct 2008 13:56:59 -0700 schrieb Chilly8:

yep, thats what the smart people do :-).

Am Thu, 23 Oct 2008 13:56:59 -0700 schrieb Chilly8:

Um, let me see now. Consider a PC making lots of TCP sessions to "random" places. There are a lot of other "random" places making TCP connections to this PC. The whole lot either self-limits to a relatively arbitrary KB/s or else tries to fill up the entire available bandwidth. Encryption or not, I'd suggest that this scenario was remarkably consistent with a P2P model, regardless of the traffic content.

Traffic analysis is (partly) about looking for recognisable patterns. Chris

Chris Davies:

Like Skype VoIP? It uses both encryption and a P2P model of bandwidth sharing. So if you block all encrypted traffic with multiple ingress and egress points you could be blocking valid Skype traffic along with any other valid P2P traffic -- for which there are plenty of legitimate uses. q.v. legaltorrents.com plus several OS and software distributions including CentOS and OpenOffice.org.

-Gary

Yep. It's a P2P protocol.

Although the original poster cautioned against use of a specific port for P2P traffic, the point I originally made was that a savvy ISP should use traffic analysis rather than just port monitoring to track P2P traffic.

If an ISP wants to prohibit/limit/restrict P2P traffic then it is entitled to do so (vote with your feet, where applicable). With content encryption it becomes harder (impossible?) for an ISP - or any other network monitoring body - to differentiate between legitimate traffic and illegal traffic.

Regards, Chris

X-No-Archive: Yes

A public VPN site would defeat pattern matching, since all the data packets would appear to all be going to the same place.

P2P software can also be used for downloading - uploading legal stuff, not everything is ilegal there! Linux distro's , for example ;-)