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Decentralize BitTorrent with Kenosis
UnderScan writes "Eric Ries, writer/programmer/CTO, authored an article 'Kenosis and the World Free Web' at Freshmeat [Owned by Slashdot's Parent OSTG]. Kenosis is described as a 'fully-distributed peer-to-peer RPC system built on top of XMLRPC.' He has combined his Kenosis with BitTorrent & removed the need for a centralized tracker. He states: 'To demonstrate Kenosis's suitability for these new applications, we have used it to improve upon another peer-to-peer filesharing application that Just Works: BitTorrent. BitTorrent does one thing incredibly well. Using a centralized "tracker," BitTorrent manages efficient distribution of data that is in high demand. We have extended BitTorrent, using Kenosis, to eliminate this dependence on a centralized tracker.'
See also the Kenosis README for details on using Kenosis-enabled BitTorrent."
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QUite useful, of course! We could distribute spatial-data, and Wi-Fi locations to PDAs and laptops in this way. There are metric tons of useful applications for BT and K.
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One of the problems with BitTorrent is that the trackers themselves can get overloaded with too many clients. If this system can eliminate something like that happening then that'd definately be a good thing.
;)
That being said, the busiest torrents I've seen are for copyright-infringing material, so I guess it's still a boon for piracy.
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
Continuing reading, you can see that it's possible to directly have a torrent reference the network. The kenosisp2p.org bit is only for legacy clients that wouldn't know what to do with a "new" tracker location.
Omnes stulti sunt.
I see several weaknesses in this, however. If I wanted to attack this, the route is pretty obvious to me. Several lines of attack stand out:
1: Start serving falsely-labelled file data that is correctly represented internally. There appears to be no moderation system built in, so bogus file data will pollute the system.
2: Start serving any file data that is inaccurately represented internally. For example, make all of your hash entries but one accurate, but make that one hash entry inaccurate. Users end up downloading most of the bad file before it errors out. Depending on the setup of the server and client, they may continue trying to get the data from elsewhere, in which case you could serve larger amounts of corrupted data, possibly by using bad clients working in conjunction.
3: Hash cracking: Brute force hash cracking could allow fake data to pass as real, hash-matching data; only a single cracked piece per file is needed. This would probably be economically inefficient, however, compared to #1 and #2 in terms of the ability to disrupt network usage.
4: Mass peer suits. If BT is the download manager here, getting the people who have the file being shared is laughably simple.
There's probably also some risks for their proposed change to allow multiple seeders, but I'd need to think about it for a while.
1, 2, and 3 require an "intelligent" client. In real life, we inherently weed out those who give bad data simply by our experiences and the experiences of those we know. The more we trust a person, the more we trust what they tell us about others. This sort of system tends to inherently isolate out the bad apples, even if they work together. Even if, working together, they manage to convince a good client that they're right and others are wrong, that good client too will simply be viewed as a liar and its data shunned. Overall, the system will remain intact. It's no easy programming task, however; yet, it is doable, as evidenced by the fact that we, as humans, do it every day.
#4 has a simple solution: Involuntary mirroring. If this system would automatically force the mirroring of data into a cache on the destination machine, and serve it from there, there would be no way to know whether a person was actually uploading copyrighted material or simply acting as a "router". Since our law has finally started to catch on to the fact that it is unreasonable to sue those whose computers pass through illegal data that they had no realistic way of knowing about, it would effectively anonymize *all* data on the network.
Hey, guys, I'm just pleased as punch to report that it's a fleet of a hundred Vogon Battle Destroyers!
(I am one of the authors of Kenosis.)
We are planning improvements to Kenosis in a number of areas such as better integration with BitTorrent, a more distributed BT tracker, simulation of larger Kenosis networks and making Kenosis work over NAT.
We'd love help with any of these or other areas.
Please join the mailing list to get involved.