Symantec Corporation has obtained a patent that will protect torrent users from downloading fake or malware-infected files by using a system to evaluate the trustworthiness of the torrent files.

The maker of the famous anti-virus software Norton Security said the automatic torrent moderating solution system could rate whether torrent files could be trusted or not and block suspicious contents to safeguard users.

"While the BitTorrent protocol represents a popular method for distributing files, this protocol also represents a common means for distributing malicious software. Unfortunately, torrent hosting sites generally fail to provide sufficient information to reliably predict whether such files are trustworthy," the patent wrote.

The patented technology is basing its evaluation from a reputation score, determined by factors such as the reputation of the original uploader, torrent sites, trackers, and other peers, the TorrentFreak reported.

For example, if an IP address of a seeder has been linked to several malicious torrent transactions, then then the entity will received a poor reputation, indicating a high likelihood that the target file pose a high security risk. And if a torrent is seeded by an entity that does not share malware-infected target files, then its trustworthiness will go up.

Aside from ranking, the system could also carry out appropriate "security actions" for a torrent file with high likelihood of being linked to malware or other malicious content. Security actions include alerting user for potential security risk, preventing access to the target file until overridden by the user, blocking network traffic linked to the torrent transaction, quarantining the target file, and even totally deleting or removing the target file.

The patented tech has been applied nearly four years ago but it has not made its way out yet to the real world.