Can you block or slow BitTorrent traffic on your router? It’s a question we’ve gotten many times. Someone else using BitTorrent on your network can slow down your connection and even open you to lawsuits. Unfortunately, there’s no easy fix.
Blocking Anything Is Difficult
Blocking anything at the home-router level is difficult. Sure, if your router has parental controls or other website-blacklisting features built-in, you could block individual websites. You could block facebook.com if you don’t want anyone accessing Facebook on your network. But there would be ways around this through VPNs and proxies.
BitTorrent is even more difficult. It’s not just blocking a single website—you’d have to block a specific protocol a computer on your network uses for peer-to-peer communication with other computers around the world. There’s no switch you can flick to block just one type of traffic, and BitTorrent has evolved to make this even more difficult.
BitTorrent Evades Blocking and Throttling
The BitTorrent protocol has had a target painted on its back for much of its history. Even internet service providers like Comcast have gone out of their way to throttle BitTorrent traffic, slowing the protocol for their customers. It’s no surprise, then, that BitTorrent has gradually evolved to be much harder to block and throttle. These tricks that help BitTorrent evade throttling by ISPs will also help it evade blocking on your home network.
You Can’t Just Block BitTorrent’s Ports
When BitTorrent was first released back in 2001, the standard ports it ran on were TCP ports 6881 through 6889. Internet service providers and other network providers caught on. Many began throttling (slowing) all traffic using these ports. Some BitTorrent trackers have banned BitTorrent clients using these ports from connecting, reasoning that these clients could slow down the overall download speed for the swarm.
Even back in those days, anyone could change the port used by their BitTorrent client to another one and evade the ban. It’s now more difficult. Modern BitTorrent clients often have built-in options to use a random port, helping evade detection.
On top of that, modern BitTorrent clients use an extension called DHT (“distributed hash table”), which means they don’t even need to rely on a centralized tracker that can be blocked—they can exchange information in a peer-to-peer fashion. When using DHT, BitTorrent clients communicate over UDP, negotiating, and using different ports for each connection.
And, while you could disable UPnP on your router to prevent BitTorrent clients from automatically forwarding ports to allow incoming connections, they could still make outgoing connections.
You Can’t Use Traffic Inspection Due to Encryption
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from How-To Geek https://ift.tt/2NgAGWk
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