How does Folding@home work?
From the point of view of the computer, Folding@home acts exactly like a web browser. It downloads files from the internet (with security checksums to ensure that they came from the official site). Indeed, it uses only port 80 (or 8080 if available) and talks to the servers via HTML, just like a web browser. From here, FAH is different: it performs it’s scientific calculation and then resends the data back. If you are running Folding@home, you will see network traffic on port 8080 or 80. Only idle CPU time will be used by the client.
