More and more ISP’s are limiting throttling BitTorrent traffic on their networks. By throttling BitTorrent traffic the speed of BitTorrent downloads decrease, and high speed downloads are out of the question.

The list of ISP’s that limit BitTorrent traffic, or plan to do so is growing every day, and according to the BBC, the ‘bandwidth war’ has begun.

Are you not sure if your traffic is being throttled Check the list of bad ISP’s.

But there is a solution. Encrypting your torrents will prevent throttling ISP’s from shaping your traffic. Since I am using Azureus on Linux as well as on Windows, I will explain how to enable encryption in this particular BitTorrent client. The same is also possible in other famous clients such as uTorrent.

The RC4 encryption, used in Azureus as well as in other clients (as far as I think), obfuscates not only the header but the entire stream. This means that it’s very hard for your ISP to detect that the traffic you are generating comes from BitTorrent.

Note that RC4 uses more CPU time than the plain encryption or no encryption. It is however harder to identify for traffic shaping devices

1. Go to: Tools > Options > Connection > Transport Encryption

2. Check the ‘require encrypted transport’ box.

3. Choose RC4 in the ‘minimum encryption’ dropdown box

note that RC4 uses more CPU time than the plain encryption or no encryption. It is however harder to identify for traffic shaping devices

4. You can choose to tick the ‘Allow non-encrypted outgoing connections if encrypted connection attempt fails’ box. This will ensure compatibility with clients that are not using encryption. However, it makes it easier for your ISP to detect BitTorrent traffic. I recommend that you try to tick this box first. If you are still not getting proper speeds untick it

5. Tick the ‘Allow non-encrypted incoming connections’ box

Here is a screenshot of Azureus on my SUSE Linux 10.1 x86_64:


That’s it, your BitTorrent traffic is now encrypted. Give it a try and see yourself.

(Thanks to torrentfreak.com for the CC-licensed content included in this post)

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