Nicholas Weaver wrote:
On Mar 26, 2009, at 7:02 PM, Woundy, Richard wrote:
P2P applications have concerns about the privacy of their users, but
do want to cooperate with the ISP to optimize network traffic in a
manner beneficial to ISPs.
This is also an area where I think the concerns are overblown. DIRECT
bulk-data P2P can't be privacy preserving, because peers know the
peers they get data from. You can try to be privacy preserving on
ENTRY to a swarm (closed world), but once a peer is in a swarm,
privacy-preserving is pretty much irrelevant.
Please consider the following case:
A self-organizing peer-to-peer overlay which exchanges peer address
information via encrypted network links. Peers in the swarm can see that
data, but passive third-party observers cannot except by observing the
traffic exchanged from peers they can see, which will only represent a
small fraction of the IP addresses in use by a large swarm.
Sending that data in the clear to the ISP in order for it to be ranked
now reveals many addresses which the peer might never connect to to that
passive observer. That's unacceptable for certain applications.
In some cases, the user might trust their ISP with that data but still
not want it to be exposed as plaintext traffic on the wire.
Matthew Kaufman
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