Bittorrent client Tribler warns anonymity feature contains critical security issue – urges to update

The developers of the anonymous Bittorrent client Tribler today released a new version fixing a critical security issue preventing users of being really anonymous. Tribler is an open source peer to peer client first developed by students at the Dutch Universities in Delft and Amsterdam, in a project subsidized by a project of the Dutch government.

Currently the project is run by an international team of scientists from more than 20 different organisations.

By creating its own Tor-like network, Tribler promised anonymity while downloading torrents with the disclaimer the the feature wasn’t broadly tested yet. The developers warned users to not depend on the feature and based on today’s releases, that was the right advice.

Version 6.4.1 fixes issues with the anonymisation feature of Tribler. According to the developers the previous version (6.4.0) contained a critical security issues. On their website they write, “our experimental hidden seeding feature did not perform adequately. You are likely to function as an exit node for the traffic of other users.”

“We are deeply sorry for this. We’re working hard on fixing this issue, but that will take significant amount of work. We will make Tribler exit nodes explicit in the future and reward them”, they continue.

Being an exit node means that Tor network traffic is passing your computer while your IP is revealed. This could mean the IP gets blocked. The issues were reported by a security expert who is also advising the Tribler team to improve security.

Tribler can be used as your regular Torrent client, it has a built-in media player which allows to stream content while downloading and the software is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.