On Mar 27, 2009, at 1:45 PM, Matthew Kaufman wrote:
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.
Except that if someone really wants to map the P2P overlay, they can
use a load of sybils participating in the network.
This is the point:
Peers can find out about other peers
Once you let an opponent into the network in any way, they can create
sufficient sibyls to map the network completely.
Not to mention the ISP can determine who's talking to who just from
traffic analysis alone, should that be desired.
It is all these items which mean that direct bulk-data P2P can't be
privacy preserving, thus relaxing privacy constraints when developing
localization should be a priority, especially when it comes to
interacting with caching.
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