Back in February I mentioned how some of the same researchers at the University of Washington that brought us BitTyrant had developed a new privacy preserving file-sharing client called OneSwarm. Today those same researchers have announced the release of version 0.6.

New features in version 0.6:

• Secure point-to-point chat
• Virtual directory hierarchies (i.e., tags)
• Set non-default save location during downloads
• Multi-key import
• Limit remote access based on IP ranges
• Change remote access password method from crypt -> SHA1+MD5 (for long password support)
• Option to not stream media files (improves performance when there are few sources)
• Fix ‘waiting for handshake’ bug that inhibits downloading if the client has been active for a while
• Fix parallel connections being closed too aggressively (causes friends to be disconnected)
• Fix rate limit not honored when there is a lot of downloading and forwarding going on
• Many miscellaneous bugfixes

Based on BitTorrent, and backwards compatible, OneSwarm is one of the many emerging new Darknet file-sharing applications that offers users concerned with privacy the ability to share data away from prying eyes.

What OneSwarm does in a nutshell is basically allow users to establish networks of friends or contacts with which to share data. It allows users to then specifically fine-tune which data is shared and with whom.

OneSwarm even goes a step further by using source address rewriting to protect user privacy. Instead of always transmitting data directly from sender to receiver (immediately identifying both), OneSwarm may forward data through multiple intermediaries, obscuring the identity of both sender and receiver.

“Although widely used, currently popular P2P networks expose the sharing behavior of their users to monitoring by third parties,” reads OneSwarm’s technical report. “To curb the indiscriminate sharing that enables this, we have built OneSwarm, a friend-to-friend file sharing client that restricts direct data sharing to trusted friends with verifiable persistent identities. Associating persistent names with peers gives users explicit control over their privacy by defining sharing permissions at the granularity of data objects and friends.”

The only drawback to Darknet apps like OneSwarm will always be the finite amount of data shared and as well as the difficulty in maintaining a large swarm of trusted peers. That said, some will find it useful, especially in countries with overzealous copyright holders.

It’s available for MAC, PC, and Linux.

DOWNLOAD ONESWARM v0.6

jared@zeropaid.com