[p2p-hackers] How is it possible to hide the traffic from a darknet?

[Jacob Madsen]

Hey,

I recently read a slideshow made by Ian Clarke and Oskar Sandberg for DEFCON 
13 and its titled "Routing in The Dark: Scalable Searches in Dark P2P 
Networks".

After going through the slideshow I found this interview with Ian Clarke: 
http://p2pnet.net/story/5790
c/p from the article:
"Clarke: The new thing here, which isn't all that clear from the NYT article, 
is that we have developed a way to create a globally scalable ‘invite only’ 
network. Think of Freenet meets Orkut. The idea is that not only will people 
not be able to know what you are doing with Freenet, but they won't even have 
any way to find out that you are running Freenet at all. This is important if 
running Freenet itself becomes illegal.""

From what I understand the new approach is the invite only thing, where each 
node is only connected to "friends".

I get that this contribute to hiding a nodes activity, since it wont make 
connection attempts to unknown nodes and wont allow unknown nodes to connect 
to itself, but I cant see how Freenet and any other "Darknet" will prevent 
the node from being discovered by sniffing the traffic.

I know this sounds like a question about Freenet, but its more about hiding 
traffic in general when building a p2p darknet.

Is it possible to "cloak" the traffic in known protocols like http? Or hide 
the traffic using another method?

/Jacob