On Mon, Dec 10, 2001 at 11:48:33AM -0800, dani-post@roisman.com said:
I realize this may be a touchy subject. For legal purposes I'll state that I'm making these inquiries as an academic excercize, as well as to enable me to block peer-to-peer programs on my own personal home network. The last thing I'd want to do is rob anyone of their free speech or "rights" to distribute illegal copies of copyrighted material.
Stating that something is a touchy subject, and proceeding to troll is not very productive (unless of course you are merely trolling ...) If you are seeking serious technical advice, prefacing your messages with political rhetoric is likely going to hamper your efforts. (and on an unrelated note, 80-column format lines are a nice touch for those of us reading mail on a CLI mail reader ... pretty much every major mail client has an option to wrap lines at X columns these days.)
Anyway... I'm interested in developing and studying comprehensive firewall and content-filtering techniques for disabling peer-to-peer filesharing applications (e.g. those using gnutella, fasttrack, other napster-style directory and download engines or stacks). If anyone knows of a mailing list /user group that has similar interests, or if you have similar interests, please email me off-list.
If you really want to stop P2P filesharing apps, you had better be prepared to constantly audit network traffic, and have an ever-expanding list of blocked ports. Don't forget about the 'old skool' filesharing systems like NFS, windows shared directories, IRC, FTP/HTTP download sites, etc. From a technical perspective, I'm not sure there is any single network-level characteristic that is shared by all P2P systems, and not shared by any other systems. Communication types vary, ports vary, protocols vary ... there may very well not be any single feature to look for in network traffic that will block all P2P traffic at this point in time. Your best bet may just be to resign yourself to regular research, and make sure that the ports you're blocking aren't also utilized by 'legitimate' traffic. I'm sure, given the variety of networks represented by this audience, there will be someone with some solid experience in this area, as opposed to my (admittedly) academic conjecture. Maybe I helped get the ball rolling, though.
Thanks all.
- Dani
-- Scott Francis darkuncle@ [home:] d a r k u n c l e . n e t UNIX | IP networks | security | sysadmin | caffeine | BOFH | general geekery GPG public key 0xCB33CCA7 illum oportet crescere me autem minui