Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Why Freenet is Complicated (or not)

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the stuff-to-think-about dept.

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."

4 of 153 comments (clear)

  1. An Overview of Freenet by jACL · · Score: 5, Informative

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

    --
    "It remains to be seen if the human brain is powerful enough to solve the problems it has created." Dr. Richard Wallace
  2. Kuro5hin artical as well. by autopr0n · · Score: 4, Informative

    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)

    --
    autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
  3. Re:Freenet is not complicated by jon_c · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

    --
    this is my sig.
  4. Re:GnuPG??? by LinuxHam · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    --
    Intelligent Life on Earth