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

Anomos: Anonymous BitTorrent Without F2F

[EverStoned]

I'm a lead dev on a similar project called Anomos, which provides anonymous and encrypted BitTorrent without requiring the slow Friend To Friend system that this uses. OneSwarm is a cool project, but we have some advantages over this (although I'm sure they have advantages over us as well.) We're a funded project as well. If you're interested in this type of thing, you might wanna take a look at our project as well. (Also check out i2pSnark!) Ultimately (perhaps by the end of this summer), I'd like to see all of these approaches under a single roof.

Or, in cartoon form...

[AnotherSteve]

For the visual learners, here is your argument in pictoral format.

http://xkcd.com/538/