GNUnet
GNUnet is a framework for secure peer-to-peer networking that does not use any centralized or otherwise trusted services. A first service implemented on top of the networking layer allows anonymous censorship-resistant file-sharing.
 Download GNUnet |
 Comment on GNUnet |
 Rate GNUnet
GNUnet is a peer-to-peer framework with focus on providing security. All peer-to-peer messages in the network are confidential and authenticated. The framework provides a transport abstraction layer and can currently encapsulate the network traffic in UDP (IPv4 and IPv6), TCP (IPv4 and IPv6), HTTP, or SMTP messages. GNUnet supports accounting to provide contributing nodes with better service. The primary service build on top of the framework is anonymous file sharing. The goal of the GNUnet project is to provide an infrastructure for secure peer-to-peer networking. All communication in GNUnet is authenticated and link-to-link encrypted. The economic model makes attacks on the network harder since the economics can be used to control resource usage. GNUnet peers exchange messages using a pluggable transport service abstraction. Currently, transport services based on UDP, TCP, HTTP and SMTP are available. The GNUnet core provides mechanisms to perform resource allocations for CPU, bandwidth and storage space. The core enforces resource limitations set by the user. GNUnet does not rely on any centralized services. New Peer-to-Peer protocols can be easily implemented on top of the basic GNUnet infrastructure. Current protocols include anonymous file sharing, a trivial chat protocol, message throughput benchmarking and network topology visualization. While our goals are similar to projects like Freenet, Gnutella, Mnet, and others, we hope to provide a superior combination of features for users that value security more than efficiency. What do you mean by 'anonymity'? Anonymity is the lack of distinction of an individual from a (large) group. A central goal for anonymous file-sharing in GNUnet is to make all users (peers) form a group and to make communications in that group anonymous, that is, nobody (but the initiator) should be able to tell which of the peers in the group originated the message. In other words, it should be difficult to impossible for an adversary to distinguish between the originating peer and all other peers. In particular, even peers should not be able to recognize from which node the message originated, after all, the adversary could control one or more of the peers. Of course, in practice, it may be possible for a powerful adversary to do some analysis and potentially assign higher probabilities for being the originator of a message to a subset of the peers. The GNUnet anonymity protocol tries to make this as hard as possible (see our paper on anonymity). The degree of anonymity (how hard it would be to distinguish an individual from the group) in GNUnet depends on the resources (mostly bandwidth) that the individual has available to achieve anonymity. In the case that an extremely powerful adversary was to break the anonymity of a peer, GNUnet provides deniability. Deniability means that the communication is secret in the sense that only the final recipient knows the key to decrypt the message. The sender and the intermediaries are unable to determine the actual contents. Since content migrates in the network, the originator of the content can often plausibly deny knowledge of the contents since the content could have migrated to the peer, making the originator indistinguishable from an intermediary. Since intermediaries have no means of decrypting the content and are (in all sane legal systems) thus not legally responsible for them (if you use the Internet to send an encrypted E-mail, your Internet Service Provider (ISP) will typically not be held responsible for the content that its servers transmit; in GNUnet, every peer plays the role of an ISP, providing Internet services to other peers). Here is a list of the main GNUnet requirements:
|
