Torrent streams over TLS

[dmarkwat]

There's a feature provided under the BitTorrent reference manual for peers to communicate with one another over SSL/TLS for torrents specifying the 'ssl-cert' field in their info metadata. I'm curious if webtorrent offers this ability to communicate over TLS (far as I can tell it does not?), if there is any plan or interest to, or if there's a recommended approach to accomplishing this.

I saw the 'ssl-cert' field was added to create-torrent (issue here) but I don't see any reference within the webtorrent code to support its presence and use. I did a fair bit of digging over the weekend and I made some progress with a hacked-up impl but am blocked in a few places where a TLS handshake would almost certainly be prone to getting bungled - by intervaled events being sent or even the Wire picking up the handshake and mistaking it for a message. Figured now would be a good time to ask if this is even something of interest before I spent more time on it :)

[knoxcard]

Yes, dont ISP's look at this data, is everything encrypted? Good point.

[feross]

I saw the 'ssl-cert' field was added to create-torrent (issue here) but I don't see any reference within the webtorrent code to support its presence and use.

We added support to create torrents with this field, but the WebTorrent engine doesn't support it.

Figured now would be a good time to ask if this is even something of interest before I spent more time on it :)

This is a neat feature, but I'm skeptical that this is useful in practice. You have to have to set up certificate signing for each peer in some out-of-band method. What is the actual use case for this?

[no-response]

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