Slashdot Mirror
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."
The need for this has been brewing for a while. Hope it does what it says on the tin.
"The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
- John Gilmore, Co-Founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
One problem from the demo seems to be that you need to have friends. I don't know anyone that has the por^h^h^h files that I want already.
Everything you know is wrong, Just forget the words and sing along.
Laws used to be about freedom and justice. But now corporations are making laws.
Lobbying used to be called bribery. It also used to be illegal.
It works by you being friends with Joe and Mike. They in turn are friends with Rachel and Simon, Brad, Jamie, and Robert respectively. That's now seven people to download from. Those 5 people have more friends, maybe with the file, maybe not, but THEIR friends might have it...
Plus, because it's not an open network, the trust between peers is higher. It will always be a "friend of a friend" that you're downloading from.
We just need to make sure nobody is friends with the MAFIAA.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
That's lobbying for you.
Self reference paradox anyone?
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
ISPs, the RIAA, and the government cannot poison the well if they can't find it.
There have been BitTorrent clients for I2P for years now. They're useless, largely, because anonymous networks are nightmarishly slow and unreliable, and very, very few people bother to upload anything interesting (at least in my opinion).
Before anyone accuses me of trolling, I've been using TOR off and on at home since 2005, and I've experimented with I2P for about 6 months in the wake of whistleblowing of the NSA wiretapping program. They're horrible, frankly, and I only put up with TOR still out of sheer cussedness. TOR at least lets you get content from the outside world; I2P is darknet-only, and darknet-only content isn't that exciting.
In fact, it's frankly dull as hell -- mostly political rants and porn (often of the less than legal variety). Sure, that could theoretically be overcome, but it won't, because performance is so bad that no one uses them but people stubbornly making a political point or people with downright criminal tastes (like the child porn freaks that seem to dominate the core.onion message boards). Mainstream consumers want convenience, and darknets don't provide it.
The performance is terrible because every download on a darknet is limited by the upstream bandwidth of the worst of your peers -- each of which is generally passing through streams from several other peers at the same time. Think about this. Think of the common 128 Kbps cap on most residential DSL or cable. And this is when you don't have unreliable or malicious peers.
So, frankly, who cares? I pirate copyrighted material because it's convenient and it lets me intelligently spend my money only on things I've vetted first -- spending my money only on things that have merit. Darknet torrenting is simply NOT convenient, and I simply wouldn't bother if it truly became necessary.
I like the concept of TOR and darknets because they provide an important technological counterbalance to tyranny, but I seriously doubt that they could survive as a useful tool for issues less relevant that free speech and survival, like wanting to get movies for free.
So a "darknet" is a private (trust-based) network.
You know, like a regular network or VPN.
Oh, and you want to use your darknet for P2P, so you want it to be popular? Then just chain your trust so friends of friends of friends can join in. They're trustworthy, right?
This is completely stupid.
You can't establish a successful P2P network without a large number of users to supply bandwidth and content.
You can't get a large number of users without making it easy to join.
You can't make it easy to join while keeping up a level of trust. If Joe Schmo from the internet can get on, then Joe Schmo from the RIAA can too.
You can't anonymize or encrypt traffic while staying decentralized. To anonymize traffic you need a central server where all traffic is routed through, or you need to route through other users and maintain some meta data centrally. If you encrypt traffic, you'll need to decrypt it, and then it becomes a key sharing problem.
It all boils down to keeping the MAFIAA out. No one can ever explain how their various "trust" mechanisms ensure that the MAFIAA stays out (because they can't).
No one ever explains what happens when the trust is broken (the whole net instantly becomes untrustworthy).
No one ever explains how encryption helps untrusted connections (it doesn't), or why it is even necessary for trusted connections (well, I'll accept this since nowadays everyone is illegally snooping in on every bit of data it seems.)
If nobody's out there promoting it with a website and support and a download link, few people will participate and it will slowly die.
You'd need kind of a large critical mass before the network can sustain its growth just by nodes emailing friends the source. A lot more than just "up and running".
You'll find plenty of "friends" on the net willing to trade in porn - or anything else, for that matter.
The question is, who do you trust?
In the case of OneSwarm ...an adversary would be able to correlate the increase in traffic between sender and receiver along an overlay path. FAQ
I can't quite shake the notion that a "web of trust" is inherently fragile.
That as they scale upward and are increasingly interwoven there will be a breach, a tear - that will unravel very quickly.
Encrypted != Anon. See above.
It relies on the model that "my friend knows 4 people who use that service, so I can acces my friend's connection to those 4 people."
So how do I join if 0 of the people on my buddy list know about the darknet?
The entire idea of the so called darknet originated in the minds of kiddies who are full of goverment conspiracies but lack the intelligence to truly think about what this means.
Your ISP KNOWS!
Your ISP knows EVERYTHING!
Your darknet lights the ISP up like a christmas tree!
Darknets only work when the ISP doesn't care to monitor and report the traffic that crosses its routers and if they don't monitor/report the traffic then you don't need a darknet.
A darknet is often suggested as a solution of getting around opressive regimes. But the problem is that the kiddies thinking about it have grown up in free countries and just don't get how effective oppression can be. Oh we are not talking the Chinese here or even the RIAA or other such amateurs but the north-korean goverment.
How is your darknet going to work if ALL internet access is monitored. Send of a packet on an unknown port to an unknown destination and they don't need to decrypt it, you will tell them what was in it because there is only so much the human body can endure.
To make it understandable, imagine you invented an absolutely 100% effective way to hide content in a telegraph message. You could send any message of any length and embed you own content within it and nobody would ever know. This would get you around any goverment trying to stop you from sending said message right?
If you say YES, then you are an idiot. All they got to do is stop you from using the telegraph itself. Put an agent in the office and simply monitor who uses the machine.
If the RIAA and the likes get their way then sending ANY info via your ISP that they cannot read as harmless, then you can't use a darknet because a darknet by its nature shows up as unknown and therefor harmfull to the powers that be.
If the teachers forbids you to talk in the class room then the students can come up with the the fanciest unknown spoken language they wish, but they still can't talk in class because the act of using your voice itself is what is forbidden, not the language itself.
So, if you and a friend agree to use an unknown network type that crosses an ISP and that ISP is monitoring its own routers then that traffic will show up and by the nature of being unknown will send up a red flag. Only when your ISP doesn't care can you use it and as I already said, when it doesn't care, you don't need it.
The only think darknets protect against is OTHERS outside your network connect from knowing about it. I can easily see whoever else is using the torrent I am downloading because this information is public. I can't see the users of your site however. So it is only simple defence against a very primitive form of snooping. But don't worry, the RIAA and the likes are already well ahead of that and want the ISP's, who by their nature are part of EVERY network connection you make to monitor for them.
Read up on freenet and its darknet dreams. It is a laugh. They dream of being the tool to allow sensitive information to get out of places like North Korea undetected when the very act of sending information out of North Korea over any non-approved and monitored method is enough to get you killed.
Or to give the final anology, I don't need to know where the messenger crossing the border has hidden the secret message or the code to read it on his body if I simply shoot everyone crossing the border.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
What we really need is wireless mesh networks formed from a bunch of cheap routers.
It would not be feasible to monitor a distributed wireless network covering a whole city or county. TOR running on top of this wouldn't have the asymmetrical upload limits that we have with our wired Internet run by The Man.
It would be the Wild West all over again.
Which is largely how the web was, before (non-porn) people realised they could make money on that network.
A major problem with this and all 'anonymous' file sharing things is the traffic! If you go through 3 nodes, that means 4x as much traffic as if you just went straight peer to peer. That means -you- need to use your machine for that much traffic, too, to help the rest of the network.
I don't know about you, but I don't feel like waiting 4x as long for my transfers.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Um, "In The West" (the United States) over 1% of the adult population is currently behind bars and 17% of all adults have been put through the penal system. Minors are being sentenced as child pornographers for sending nude cameraphone shots of themselves to their girl/boyfriends.
I think your view of the West may be Hollywood-tinted and overly optimistic. The war on drugs (a kind of civil war) is just starting to abate; legislators and police-state apparatchiks are looking for the next new frontier to exercise their lust for punishment.
"Your Honor and Honorable Jurors, this man knowingly and willingly ran software designed to allow pedophiles and other criminals, even terrorists, to hide their identities while conducting crimes against children online, and to circumvent filters put forth by lawful authority. He will continue to help these people exploit the defenseless, unless we stop him here and now."
It is quite possible that you will be jailed, at least until the trial, and even if you're not, you'll be harassed by the "save the children" -mob.
The spirit of Salem Witch Trials is alive and well.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.