Combining BitTorrent With Darknets For P2P Privacy

CSEMike writes "Currently popular peer-to-peer networks suffer from a lack of privacy. For applications like BitTorrent or Gnutella, sharing a file means exposing your behavior to anyone interested in monitoring it. OneSwarm is a new file sharing application developed by researchers at the University of Washington that improves privacy in peer-to-peer networks. Instead of communicating directly, sharing in OneSwarm is friend-to-friend; senders and receivers exchange data using multiple intermediaries in an overlay mesh. OneSwarm is built on (and backwards compatible with) BitTorrent, but includes numerous extensions to improve privacy while providing good performance: point-to-point encryption using SSL, source-address rewriting, and multi-path and multi-source downloading. Clients and source are available for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows."

Comments

Yay!!!

[Jane Q. Public]

Had to happen eventually. But it would be nice if there were C-based clients rather than Java. Java is cool, but it is also slow.

Still, this is just the first of what one can hope will be many. Props for doing it first.

Re:A better solution

[The End Of Days]

Why bother justifying the piracy with the story? Obviously you feel just fine doing it for the sake of growing your collection of entertainment. What's the point of making it seem like it actually has some noble purpose?

Re:If you aren't doing anything wrong,

[DaveV1.0]

It is not sarcasm, dumb ass. It is the truth.

In this case, the only reason people would want to hide what they are doing is if they are doing something they know is wrong. After all, in this case, people are to both put something out for consumption by random, possibly anonymous, people which would imply that they want as wide a dispersal as possible and thus imply a desire for widespread knowledge of their activity. Yet, they also don't want certain people knowing what they are doing, which is the only reason for secrecy.

There are other activities that follow this model. Most of them is either illegal and the ones that are legal are looked down on by society at large as being evil or wrong.