[p2p-hackers] In search of the Darknet....

[Duncan B. Cragg]

I Googled, but neither 'F2F' (friend-to-friend) nor 'Darknet' are
discussed in the P2P-hackers archives. Are P2P-hackers just not
interested in them?

--------------------------------------

Putting Darknets into context, private-to-public is a continuum:

  -: data owned by just me (total privacy - not our concern in P2P)
  -: data owned by me and you (not P2P either: encrypted email)
  -: data owned by a group (F2F/Darknet)
  -: data owned by a larger group (!)
  -: data owned by everyone; i.e. no-one (anonymous P2P)

The bigger the group, the less private (more public) is something
published within the group, when everyone is potentially identified, and
the more anonymous is anything published in the name of the group to
people outside it. People inside the group are also part of the
potential recipients when publishing in the name of the group, so,
through appropriate technology, it is possible to achieve anonymity in
the eyes of everyone in proportion to the size of the group. If the
group is everyone, it is possible to achieve complete anonymity when
the technology supports it.

Anonymous P2P such as Freenet, AntsP2P, MUTE, I2P, Napshare and GNUnet
are technologies supporting that, completely public, end of the scale.

If you want to use a Darknet technology, then clearly you have to be
able to trust it, both to keep your private activities private, and,
where this functionality is required, to support publishing in the name
of the group without others being able to trace it back to you.
Normally, we trust open technologies more than closed or commercial
ones.

--------------------------------------

So, what open F2F Darknets are there? I found two that seemed to fit the
description and that had published information: WASTE and 'Freenet 2'.

WASTE is only private in a group because the network itself is
downscaled physically to the members of the group. Not the
general-purpose, scalable solution we seek for our ambitions of global
domination, um, that is, for the obvious goal of being able to choose an
arbitrary degree of privacy or publicity, of anonymity, dynamically and
on a file-by-file or chat-by-chat basis.

So, on to 'Freenet 2': Ian Clarke and Oskar Sandberg's DEFCON slides:

    http://www.math.chalmers.se/%7eossa/defcon13/vegas1_print.pdf

But, and this is where I may have misread the slides or there may
be more to it than I got from the slides: this /isn't/ about a Darknet -
in spite of the starting and ending slides' assertions - it seems to be
about the same small-world P2P that's all the rage in PDF-research-land
(and much discussed on this list) - unstructured (non-DHT) P2P network
query and routing optimisation.

Out-of-band peer introduction was mentioned, including needing a trusted
rendezvous for NAT-ed peers. But limiting connections to trusted friends
in itself creates a small WASTE-like network - otherwise, how do you
prevent leakage, without adding the enforcement of ACLs (which was not
mentioned in the slides)?

In other words, the goals of the Darknet (privacy for small groups) are
opposite to those of both of Freenet and seemingly also 'Freenet 2'
(anonymity, public publishing and querying). I hope more details will
come out to clarify this issue.

In the meantime, I'm still left with the surprising conclusion that
no-one is implementing the global Darknet (or 'Friendnet') in an open
way!!


Duncan B. Cragg


Footnote:

   Closed or commercial approaches that apparently implement some kind of
   Darknet: I've mentioned Imeem before, and there's also WiredReach,
   NodeZilla, Groove, KDrive, KDX and SpinXpress.

   WiredReach is actually a possibility now that it's been opened up
  (wiredreach.org). It uses JXTA and XMPP rather than a special protocol,
   but I'm not sure how it does Darknet functions: certainly XMPP doesn't
   do group chat (even if Jabber may). WiredReach is a commercial entity,
   but that needn't mean it's not trustworthy...

   NodeZilla is closed (the 'Network Agent' isn't open even though the
   client is), but apparently achieves 'ACL' functionality through
   sharing so-called 'magnet' keys to allow access to data.