Hi everyone, In the original paper for Freenet (Freenet: A Distributed Anonymous Information Storage and Retrieval System), the authors discredit the use of private information retrieval protocols.
"Private Information Retrieval schemes [9] provide much stronger guarantees for information consumers, but only to the extent of hiding which piece of information was retrieved from a particular server. In most cases, the fact of contacting a particular server in itself reveals much about the information retrieved." I think that this isn't really the case with freenet, because no one knows what is on a person's server (it's encrypted); so, by contacting a server there is no risk. Also, couldn't it be considered more secure because no one knows what data is being requested when you use a Private Information Retrieval (PIR) scheme. If this were the case, there wouldn't be a need for routing data to anonymize origin requests. I was wondering what people here thought and if it made sense to them, because I am not too very familiar with freenet, but very interested in it. Thanks very much, Michael
