Nullsoft's Waste: Encrypted, Distributed, Mesh Net

Myriad writes "Nullsoft, makers of the venerable Winamp MP3 player, released today a secure, distributed mesh-like networking protocal and platform called Waste. This v1.0 beta release uses RSA (key based) and Blowfish encryption for security, and features Instant Messanging and group chat, along with file browsing, searching, and transfer. Waste has been released under the GPL, with source and binaries available here."

Comments

Interesting, not your usual peer to peer app.

[rmlane]

Designed for small groups of people (up to 50)

It allows easy colloboration across firewalls, and only one user inside the firewall is required to allow all users inside access to the mesh.

Each link is encrypted, but each message is decrypted and re-encrypted at each hop of the mesh, so you have to trust all of the nodes. It's also very hard to drop a node onc it is trusted, as each node shares public keys around to make sure all nodes have all public keys. Initial connection to the mesh requires manual key exchange. PITA, but moderatley secure.

All network traffic is encrypted, it will flood each mesh link with a minimum amount of bandwidth to foil traffic analysis.

Re:fix what needs fixing

[misuba]

Winamp 2.9 is the latest release of the Winamp 2.x codebase, which takes most of the good ideas that went into Winamp 3 and codes them back to an API free of excessive abstraction. It's been out for weeks, if not months. Check your facts before posting.

Re:Hmmm....

[glob]

"undoubtedly call a tool whose sole purpose is to illicitly distribute copyrighted works"

uhh, waste is for small workgroups only ..

WASTE is a software product and protocol that enables secure distributed communication for small (on the order of 10-50 nodes) trusted groups of users.

it's not about p2p file sharing, rather it's a colaborative tool.

sure, you could use to to share illegal stuff, but it's really no different in that respect to email, icq, whatever.

Re:Gnutella

[MacJedi]

Yes, they did. However, AOL didn't like it and got it shut down within the day. Then someone (Justin Frankel?) leaked the source and the rest is history.

/joeyo

Re:Gnutella

[Magila]

Indeed, here is the original slashdot story. Of course AOL quickly ended development at nullsoft, it lived on after the protocol had been reverse engineered and others picked up where nullsoft left off.

Re:For readers of Pynchon. . .

[IntlHarvester]

Above post was not at all offtopic. Crying of Lot 49 is a good nerd book, so go read it.

In the book, W.A.S.T.E is an underground postal system that allowed people to exchange messages without the authorities finding out.

The Right Hand Knows

[fm6]

In fact what we have here is a first cut at a secure distributed network presence system, something that would allow you to run an icq-like network between people you trust without being spied on by a central server. There are many reasons why one would want this: maybe *you* just want to trade copyrighted files, but *I* want to communicate securely and efficiently with my associates.

Besides which, this software isn't particularly useful for illicit file sharing. For that you need a way to get into contact with strangers who happen to have a copy of the file you want to download. The encryption features would actually seem to work against that.

Also, this is technology that might be very useful to AOL. AIM's big drawback is that it's not very secure, and really shouldn't be used for sensitive corporate communication. (Though the engineers at my last employer used it anyway.) AOL could persuade people that are already using AIM for free to upgrade to WASTE in order to secure their communications. Not to mention the other features.

We Await Silent Trystero's Empire!

Found a Mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

while perusing the winamp forums, I found a mirror:

waste installer
waste source