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

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: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