midwest_mainline

Midwest Mainline is a BitTorrent Distributed Hash Table written in Rust with all async network calls.

why the name?

The BitTorrent DHT is sometimes referred to as the "Mainline" DHT since there were other non-standard DHTs that ran on clients that supported the BT protocol. Since calling it rusty mainline is too boring, the name of rust conjures up the images of midwestern states, hence midwest mainline!

what is a DHT?

A DHT exist to solve the issue that of spreading a large hash table to multiple machines and providing redundancy. In the case of BitTorrent, it is used to share information about other peers for a given torrent.

The gist of a DHT is by using the same key space for the identification of us and the key in the hash table, we only include what's near us in the hash table. By maintaining some contacts about other nodes that are close to our id, other nodes can ask us about our neighbors and gradually lead to the node that has the exact key they want.

• For the original paper, see
• For an excellent video explaining it, see
• For the BitTorrent specification, see

roadmap

• routing
• bootstrapping
• find node
• get peers
• ping
• security extension BEP-42
• announce
• respond to ping
• respond to get peers
• respond to announce
• respond to find node
• expiration for hash table
• ping and prune for routing table
• upload to crate.io

state of the development

As of right now, the code base is still experience large changes daily and very little comments are added.

warning

I do not have any formal training in security, anything that listens for incoming traffic should be considered as problematic and require attention. Especially when the protocol is effectively send over clear text.

unstable tokio features

This library uses unstable tokio features for tracing, go see tokio's docs. about using unstable features.

TL;DR

The library is still in beta, I am aware the interfaces are quite clunky

use std::io;
use midwest_mainline::dht_service;
use midwest_mainline::dht_service::DhtV4;
use std::net::SocketAddrV4;
use std::str::FromStr;

#[tokio::main]
async fn main() -> io::Result<()> {
    let external_ip = public_ip::addr_v4().await.unwrap();
    let dht = DhtV4::bootstrap_with_random_id(
                    SocketAddrV4::from_str("0.0.0.0:51413").unwrap(),
                    external_ip,
                    vec![
                    // dht.tansmissionbt.com
                    "87.98.162.88:6881".parse().unwrap(),
                    // router.utorrent.com
                    "67.215.246.10:6881".parse().unwrap(),
                    // router.bittorrent.com, ironically that this almost never responds
                    "82.221.103.244:6881".parse().unwrap(),
                    // dht.aelitis.com
                    "174.129.43.152:6881".parse().unwrap(),
                ],
        ).await?;
    let client = dht.client();

    // make sure this is alive
    tokio::spawn(dht.run());

    // now you can do hackerman things with the client

    Ok(())
}