p2p Encryption

A while back, I use to live on campus. As as such I saw things from a students point of view. I didnt care, how, i just wanted my fast Kazaa downloads. Little did i realise, so did every one else on campus. Needless to say, our Badwidth bill was rather high. Our Network admins invested in a Hard ware Firewall that could scan the packets for the content and filter them based on the priroity. So traffic running on port 80, would get a larger pipe line than say packets running on common P2P programs.

Thinking that we were crafty, my roomate and i just changed the port that our P2P progrma was using. But alas, we were still filtered. Im no out of college but i want to propose a method around such a filtering program, and see what you guys think.

So the Hardware device was produced by the company called Packeteer. I did some reasearch on it, and the hardware is able to deduce not only what program the packets belonged to, but also the content. This led me to think, If i were to encrypt the contents of the packet, the Packeteer would then, no longer, be able to view what im downloading. However turns out, there is an "Everything else" catagory. And if Packeteer doesnt reconise the packet content, then it'll throw it to a small bandwidth line. So then i got to thinking, what if... you were able to construct an HTML based File transfer program.

HTML pages are relativly small, but what if you created a program that could transfer entire chunks of data that just looked like it was a webpage? You probably would be dealing with alot of pages, but i think firewalls and packet filter's would have a difficult time telling the difference. As you can see such a project would be rather taxing to creat, but none the less i think it could be possible. One the HTML based packets are recieved by the p2p program (which too could be a webpage hosted on the local machine) would reconstruct the packets into actual working files. So long question short. Is it posible to encrypt data so that it looks like its an HTML file. ( it doesnt nessessarly have to actualy be anythything, it would just contain a bunch of tags and such).

Thoughts?
~pcllwtfdtm

I'd think that would have massive overhead (very low usefull data / useless data ratio)

Other than that it could quite possibly work..

A software like that must be able to use "regular" http to cross trhu the firewalls. It needs to use http because some places simply block https (and it will be easy to do thru https).
how about httport or htc/hts? i think that httport uses a "trick" like you are talking about.
And the overhead is huge.

There'd be no point. Yes, you'd be transfering data faster, but there'd be way more data needing transfer. In the long run, it'd be a waste of time.

Yeah i figured the ammount of packets would increase to the point where it wouldnt be practical, but regaurdless I was curious to see if it were posible. Neat to think it would work, unfortunate that it wouldnt be pracical. Thanks for the Reply Guys