Anonymous P2P

The name anonymous P2P is somewhat of a misnomer. This is so since by design a network node must be pseudonymous since it must have an "address" at which it can be reached by other peer nodes in order to exchange data. However, usually this address, especially on anonymous networks, does not contain any directly identifiable information. Thus a user is highly, but not completely, anonymous. (in friend-to-friend networks, only your friends can know that your address is used to exchange files)

The P2P community's interest in anonymous P2P has increased rapidly in recent years for many reasons, including distrust of government (especially in undemocratic regimes), and digital imprimatur. Such a network may also appeal to those wishing to share copyrighted music files illegally - the Recording Industry Association of America has successfully tracked and threatened to sue some users on non-anonymous P2P networks.

Uses of P2P

There are many personal uses of anonymous P2P technology which include: anonymous websurfing to prevent the tracking of visitors; blocking governments from collecting lists of website visitors; circumvent censorship by employers, ISPs, schools and government; protecting whistleblowers.

Governments are also interested in anonymous P2P technology. The United States Navy is financing the development of Free Haven's Onion Routing "TOR" for politically sensitive negotiations and to aid in hiding the identity of government employees for intelligence gathering work.

The philosophy of anonymous P2P

There are several arguments made by individuals as to why they consider anonymous P2P applications desirable and in some cases necessary to freedom of speech and the free flow of information.

One argument is that true freedom of speech, especially on controversial subjects, is difficult or impossible unless individuals can speak anonymously. If anonymity was not offered, then they could be subject to threat or reprisal for voicing an unpopular view. This is one reason why voting is done by secret ballot in many democracies, to prevent this kind of intimidation.

Consequences of P2P anonymity

Pornography trading is common on anonymous P2P networks, and some believe that the networks aid terrorism. There are several responses to these criticisms, one being that information is neutral and that it is people acting on the information that is good or evil. A second is that these current issues are examples of moral panics, and that if anonymous peer-to-peer networks had been around in the 1950s or 1960s, they might have been targeted for carrying information about civil rights or anarchism.

Other issues include:

• Difficult or impossible to uphold laws that can be broken through P2P networks. This could lead to the breakdown of intellectual property. Copyright could be safely ignored (though see digital rights management)
• With anonymous money, it becomes possible to arrange anonymous markets where one can buy and sell just about anything anonymously. Assassination markets would be the dark side of this. The transfer of physical goods between buyer and seller may compromise anonymity, however.
• It is easy to publish any information you want without the possibility of having your physical identity revealed. This could be used to openly publish information that governments forbids, like child pornography, but also other controversial information which the government wants to keep hidden like details about corruption issues.
• Anonymous money could be used to avoid tax collection. That could lead to a movement towards anarcho-capitalism. It is highly unlikely that all necessary transactions could be done anonymously, however; if nothing else, a government could still rely on property taxes.

Overall, anonymous peer to peer networks makes it impossible to hinder information to spread. Digital money inside a banking computer system could be considered to be just information.

Anonymous P2P clients

In Japan, the anonymous P2P clients Winny and its successor Share are the most popular filesharing clients in the country.

In the United States, Freenet is a mildly popular P2P network that is used as an anonymous, P2P version of the World Wide Web. Other, lesser known filesharing clients include:

• Azureus was the first Java BitTorrent client that made it possible to switch to anonymous mode on the I2P and Tor (anonymous network).
• ANts P2P
• Entropy was written in response to Freenet. It accomplishes the same task, and has the same interface, but the internal implementation is very different, it's written in C, it claims to be much faster, and easy on the computer's resources. However, entropy is no longer in development.
• Free Haven
• GNUnet
• I2P
• MFC Mute ,written in C, and Napshare ,written in wxWidgets, are clients of the MUTE network.
• Mnet
• Mojo nation
• MUTE

• Publius
• Tangler
• WASTE

  Some security breaches in current networks and their solutions

• In countries where P2P is forbidden, your ISP can suspect that you use P2P since most of the networks don't use standard ports like https or pop-ssl by default (this solution, along with using a layer of standard ssl, would be a very simple form of steganography)
• Traffic analysis of all your links by your ISP could easily show that you automatically forward some documents. Solution: even when the links are inactive, send random padding bytes.
• In countries where strong crypto is forbidden, serious steganography should be used.
  

  See also

• F2F networks
  

  External links

• Anonymous-p2p.org