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

Been done, and better supported.

[srealm]

How is this any different to P2P over TOR, except for the fact TOR exit nodes tend to block several 'standard' P2P ports (which is easily fixed by using a non-standard port for your P2P)?

TOR has the added avantage of nobody needing to use some new piece of specialized software to be able to get the benefits of anonymity - and it's not used for a single purpose - so people can't go 'Oh! he's using OneSwarm! He must be P2P sharing, and want to hide it!' ....

What about TOR?

[Khopesh]

Why not implement it within TOR? We could use some more exit points, and this seems like a great method of accomplishing that.

I still insist that the TOR cloud should contain transparent caching proxies and the like so that it doesn't need to use those rare exit nodes as often...

And before somebody starts groaning about it, TOR isn't flawed or "insecure." It's not a security tool. It is an anonymizer. Its purpose is exactly what P2P users need.