Why Freenet is Complicated (or not)

JohnBE writes "'This article is primarily a friendly rebuttal to Steven Hazel's CodeCon 2002 talk entitled "libfreenet: a case study in horrors incomprehensible to the mind of man, and other secure protocol design mistakes". Hazel presents the Freenet protocol as an overly complicated, self designed crypto layer. In fact, though somewhat complicated, literally every step in the protocol was carefully thought out to resist certain attacks and to increase certain properties desirable for Freenet operators and the network as a whole.' Interesting in light of Peek-a-booty, this article covers many of the issues involved with creating a anonymous P2P system."

Comments

Oh the joys of cross-posting

[stjobe]

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/2/17/203032/375

An Overview of Freenet

[jACL]

Here's a quick overview of Freenet, if you need to get up to speed.

Kuro5hin artical as well.

[autopr0n]

This was also posted to another scoop site, kuro5hin :)

For those of you who care, Ian Clark also commented on the story himself(1 2 3 4 5)

Re:I could have sworn I read this verbatim before

[JohnBE]

I beleive the paragraph I submitted was the original article, the Kuro5hin article was posted later on. If that wasn't the case it was submitted simeltaneosly to two different sites. Big deal. Does it matter as long as we get the beef?

Re:I could have sworn I read this verbatim before

[JohnBE]

I did supply single quotes for cosmetic reasons and to denote that it wasn't written by me. Hence the link to the article with full author attribution. I have no control over the time it was posted, or if it was seperately posted at Kuro5hin.

Anonymous P2P systems

[Anonymous Coward]

If you wish to read about well-designed anonymous P2P systems, look at Crowds (similar design to Pick-a-Booty, years earlier).
Anonymity has many more uses: censorship resistant systems often use anonymity. See, for example Free Haven or the following article on a new design
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~aas23/Anon_p2p2.ps

Re:Freenet is not complicated

[jon_c]

I can't really comment on mojonation as last time i checked they didn't have any real documenation on how it actually worked, but Gnutella is way simpler then Freenet.

I wrote a gnutella client in one night, when gnutella first hit the net people had already figured out the protocol and we're writing clients for it within days. There are only about 5 different commands in Gnutella, i have no idea how many freenet is. But i have attempted to understand more then just a high level concept and found the details to be confusing as all hell.

anyway,

-Jon

Re:GnuPG???

[LinuxHam]

The purpose of GPG is either to encrypt data specifically for one person, certify exactly who created/encrypted said data, or both. Freenet was designed to encrypt data for anyone while guaranteeing anonymity of the submitter.

Yes, you could use GPG to encrypt with a symmetric key and just not sign it, but you'd still need to build an infrastructure around it. Freenet wants "plausible deniability" for the hosting server, making it impossible for anyone to decrypt the data as its stored on the disk. A symmetric key with GPG would be immediately decryptable.