On Wed, Feb 06, 2002 at 01:49:33PM +0100, Nico Galoppo wrote: > > > What are the opinions of the freenet developers on a pipenet-like > > > 'frontend' to Freenet? Could it be a plausible extension to the basic > > > Freenet, much in the same way as a 'mixnet' frontend has been proposed > > > before. What could be the added benefits in providing a higher degree of > > > anonimity, in particular for document inserters and retrievers? > > > > > > AnonNet is such a pipenet implementation, what we would like to do is > > > integrate into the Freenet core. Could the existing Freenet PKI be used. > > > What is its status anyway in the CVS code? <snip> > > Can you explain more about pipenets and AnonNet in particular (maybe > > some URLs)? I'm guessing it works at the transport layer, so in Fred > > you would write an AnonNet transport (see freenet.transport.* -- right > > now the only transports are TCP and SSL). <snip> > I'm not sure where it would fit into Freenet. I'll have a look at the > transport layer asap.
So pipenet/AnonNet is a replacement for a TCP/IP stream opened to another host, with the semantic difference of not revealing to the receiver how to contact the originator, so that replies can only be made while the link is open. It seems adding something like this to Freenet would be semantically equivalent to adding an onion-style prerouting step when forwarding a request. Nowadays when you receive a request from another node you don't know for sure whether that node originated the request, but you know it might have. With the onion prerouting you would know for sure that it didn't, and you wouldn't know what node did. Since you'd have to do this at each hop it would probably hurt performance a lot. It's hard to quantify how much "extra anonymity" you'd derive. There's also the problem of links failing. They'd have to be re-established from the originating end with some kind of session key, which would force nodes to hold on to reply messages until Alice reopens the link. Not fun at all, particularly with the current architecture. As a side note, it might be worth exploring the addition of traffic shaping (or un-shaping ;-) features to Freenet like those found in pipenet/AnonNet, regardless of whether the onion-routing aspect can be made useful. -tc _______________________________________________ freenet-tech mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.freenetproject.org/mailman/listinfo/tech
