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In this case, I am referring to that of a university/ISP detecting torrent traffic and shaping it to like 0.1kb/s which is what I get.

Suppose I am using uTorrent, and am able to get some peers. I have both streams encrypted, but it seems that the network is able to shape it to a close-to-0 traffic.

I'd like to understand how the administrators are able to detect that it is a torrent traffic.

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closed as off topic by soandos, random♦ Aug 11 '11 at 14:19

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This could be done many many many ways. They could be doing packet inspection, they could be whitelisting certain servers, they could be blacklisting certain protocols, etc.

pfsense is a cool router distro based on BSD that offers some interesting traffic shaping features. I don't think they're that sophisticated, but I also don't know for sure how they are implemented, so maybe they're epic afterall.

If you wanna get around it, I suggest you rent a cheap VPS somewhere, like here, and then proxy torrent traffic through it. If you use something like a socks proxy (ssh -D [port number] [username]@[ip of your vps]) then they're gonna have a fairly impossible time legitimately identifying what that traffic is by anything beyond quantity of traffic. If they still throttle that, then I'd probably suggest you go get a job in their IT department ;P

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If its encrypted, you cant tell by the packets... – soandos Aug 10 '11 at 1:55
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@soandos - well, the whole point of the ssl wrapped proxy traffic is exactly that. However, it is conceivable that statistical components of the traffic could indicate the likely type of traffic. But you'd never know for sure as indeed the payloads would be hidden. – Doc Aug 10 '11 at 2:04
Either way, packet inspection cannot be helpful here. – soandos Aug 10 '11 at 2:29
That's why I suggest the proxy work-around. Inspection fails, they'd have to fall back on stats. – Doc Aug 10 '11 at 2:39
You have nothing to worry about. They can't prove anything with stats. In addition, if you have enough information, a proxy does not save you. – soandos Aug 10 '11 at 3:12
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