A few weeks ago Chris Brunner post an article called “Why You Shouldn’t Run BitTorrent Over Tor?”. I found this point of view too restrictive. This point of view makes the assumption that people are stupid. So as using TOR with bittorrent is not so easy, we should prevent people to use them. I will list below the right and wrong ways to use Bittorrent with TOR.

The document  How to set up Azureus to work with Tor ? on Azureus web site describes the different kind of architectures with the corresponding communication channels impacting the TOR (anonymous network). Actually the only architecture that makes sense is when the communication between the bittorrent client and the tracker use the TOR network. It doesn’t make sense to route the data communication between peers toward the TOR network. This will overload the TOR network and the download speed will be very slow. But even for bittorrent client tracker communication TOR is not the solution if you connect to a private tracker. Private trackers often use your IP address as identifier. As TOR change this information, TOR usage with private tracker will cause you to be banned.

To summarize, TOR + Bittorrent may be used when the following conditions are met:

• You connect to a public tracker
• Your Bittorrent Client is configured to route to TOR only BT client-tracker communications