Re: Can a tracker actively tell clients to stop downloading?

This update mechanism could also be applied to the web site mirroring.
 A high-traffic (or "slashdotted") web site can easily be torrented
and updated with the Yum protocol.

Can we move toward making this standard-ish?

Jason

--- In [email protected], Blue Boar <BlueBoar@t...> wrote:
> Bill Cox wrote:
> > Very interesting idea...  BitTorrent and Yum could be pretty cool.  It
> > sounds like a simple enough extension to the tracker response.  Some
> > sort of a "move_to" key could do the trick.
> 
> There are security issues there.  Right now, the .torrent file is your
> secure bit of information.  If you got the .torrent file intact from a
> known-good source, then no one can trick your client into downloading
> (well, keeping) the wrong thing.  All the tracker can do is go away, and
> deny you service.
> 
> If you allow the tracker to specify that a torrent has been superceeded
> or changed, then it can hand you arbitrary content.
> 
> I realize that this isn't a practical problem for a lot of the typical
> torrent usages, where random website give you torrent files to random
> trackers, and the contents are a crapshoot anyway.  However, it's a
> feature that shouldn't be thrown away without some serious
consideration.
> 
> For example, for your YUM case, you wouldn't want me to be able to DNS
> spoof tracker.yum.org, and tell all the clients "no wait, go over here
> and get my updated trojaned files instead".
> 
> You'd probably have to add on a signing and versioning scheme, so that
> there was a trust chain from the original .torrent file to updated ones.
> 
> 						BB





 
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