In BitTorrent v2, the info-dictionary is also computed by SHA-256, which poses a compatibility challenge with the DHT and trackers, which have protocols that expect 20 byte hashes. One consequence of this is that hashes are 32 bytes instead of 20 bytes. The hash function for piece data was changed to SHA-256. This post describes the new features of the BitTorrent v2 protocol.

Given a new hash function would not be backwards compatible, a few other changes were proposed as well, while we were taking the compatibility hit anyway. What is BitTorrent v2?īitTorrent v2 kick-started with an effort to transition away from SHA-1 as the hash function for pieces, shortly after google announced having produced a collision. BiglyBT also has an implementation of BitTorrent v2 to be released in the near future. The libtorrent support for bittorrent v2 was mostly implemented by Steven Siloti. Most of the specification work of BEP 52 was done by the8472.

One of them is support for BitTorrent v2. Libtorrent-2.0 has just been released with a few major new features.

How to add torrent by hash