infohash.lol

What?

Inspired by sites like keys.lol and everyuuid.com.

BitTorrent is a communication protocol for peer-to-peer file sharing, which enables users to distribute data and files over the internet in a decentralized manner.

Every available torrent has a unique 40-character hexadecimal “infohash”. This website enumerates every possible infohash (of which there around 10⁴⁸) and displays them on pages of 32 at a time, for a total of 45,671,926,166,590,716,193,865,151,022,383,844,364,247,891,968 pages.

BitTorrent clients can use a distributed hash table (DHT) to advertise themselves as a potential peer for a given infohash. When you load a page of infohashes, a DHT query is made for each of them to look for any advertising peers. If peers are found, another request is made to each to ask them for more metadata about the infohash, such as the name of the torrent and the files it contains.

See it in action:

• The “Ubuntu 24.04.3” torrent has an infohash of d160b8d8ea35a5b4e52837468fc8f03d55cef1f7
• The “Sintel” torrent has an infohash of 08ada5a7a6183aae1e09d831df6748d566095a10

The chance of randomly finding an active infohash is very small, but not zero...

* More accurately, every single torrent available to the DHT is on this website; clients can choose not to advertise themselves as peers in this way, and solely use tracker servers instead. This is often the case for ‘private’ torrents/trackers.

Why do many torrents show a single peer, but never metadata?

There is no validation that an infohash corresponds to a real torrent—any client can announce anything. Many crawlers and indexers continuously pick random or sequential infohashes and announce themselves so they can later detect other announcers, and malicious clients or poorly written bots can spam the network with anything they like.

This is further confirmed by the observation that swathes of sequential infohashes all share the same single peer. Who is the mysterious 31.200.249.0/24..? 5 points to the person who works out who it is flooding the DHT!

It is also possible that a legitimate peer does not support the protocol extension required to exchange metadata.

Enjoy this?

Why not check out my other site, Library of Babel, which contains every single book!