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#1 2012-12-06 02:56:27

skiguy0123
Member
Registered: 2011-01-22
Posts: 9

rtorrent question

Hey guys,
Forgive me if I'm not posting this in the right forum. I rarely use bittorrent, and had a question regarding it's security. If I run rtorrent with no .rtorrent.rc in a directory with other files (not torrents) are those files exposed in some way? Even if they don't have a .torrent file, can people still access them? Most bittorrent security issues seem to revolve around getting caught, not in protection files on your computer. (Disclaimer, I'm using it for FOSS software).
Thanks!

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#2 2012-12-06 08:41:10

rzrscm
Member
Registered: 2012-11-17
Posts: 95

Re: rtorrent question

What do you mean?  Torrent users wouldn't have access to your files other than data from the files you're seeding.  It's not like other P2P networks where users could access a shared folder on another user's machine.  Your IP is exposed to other peers, though.

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#3 2012-12-06 16:55:59

skiguy0123
Member
Registered: 2011-01-22
Posts: 9

Re: rtorrent question

I guess my question is: how is it decided what files get seeded? rtorrent is going to decide to seed any files in the active directory, is it? From what i understand, this is impossible, but I wanted to make sure.

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#4 2012-12-06 17:42:50

Xyne
Administrator/PM
Registered: 2008-08-03
Posts: 6,963
Website

Re: rtorrent question

The torrent files that you load determine which files are downloaded and/or seeded. You could put anything that you want in the rsync's download directory. Unless the name matches a file in an active torrent, it won't do anything.

That's my understanding at least.


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#5 2012-12-06 20:52:27

pyroscope
Member
Registered: 2011-03-11
Posts: 33
Website

Re: rtorrent question

The only major security risk is when you stupidly expose the xmlrpc port via TCP to the world (i.e. bind it to a routable IP). Then you basically fully expose the user account rT runs under. Same goes for binding it to localhost, but then it's "just" the other users on that machine.

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#6 2012-12-07 09:03:01

rzrscm
Member
Registered: 2012-11-17
Posts: 95

Re: rtorrent question

skiguy0123 wrote:

I guess my question is: how is it decided what files get seeded? rtorrent is going to decide to seed any files in the active directory, is it? From what i understand, this is impossible, but I wanted to make sure.

If a torrent isn't loaded into rtorrent, it's not going to get seeded.  If you have it configured to automatically detect and load torrent files from a directory, you can remove the torrent file so it doesn't get loaded again.  If it still shows up in rtorrent, you can just stop and remove it with ctrl+d.

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