Privacy by anonymity
This report from Hexus says that the BSA (Business Software Alliance) is monitoring BitTorrent traffic and sending warnings to users who are “caught” downloading or uploading software protected by the BSA. This is definitely not news, but it’s relatively uncommon in Europe, and in this particular instance it happened to a UK user nicknamed Pipex. I know that warnings such as this have been sent to universities and similar institutions, but Europeans still aren’t used to getting such warnings personally.
This made me remember a concept pushed by Eben Moglen, one of the creators of GNU General Public License, which I’ve had the honor to interview a couple of years back. He’s an avid supporter of using encryption in everything you do on the Internet; not so much to protect yourself from being spied on, but to create a critical mass of encrypted content which would make any efforts from big companies and the authorities to control the flow of information so hard they would basically be forced to give up. He estimates that if about 30% of the net’s traffic were encrypted, it would be too expensive for most parties to spy on users except in rare, special cases. You can find more on this particular theme in one of Eben’s old interviews.
This in turn reminds me of all the p2p programs which incorporate some degree of encryption or another way to achieve anonymity, which have appeared (and, in many cases, disappeared) over the years. Unfortunately, none of these gained a big enough following, so anonymous p2p is still just an idea that awaits true realization. However, under the pressure of lawsuits, the p2p community will be forced to take another look at encrypted/anonymous p2p. Maybe we just need to wait for the right “killer application” which would convert everyone, or maybe it’s the matter of some popular program like eMule introducing encrypted p2p as one of the features.
In any case, here’s a list of several p2p applications that use various techniques to achieve anonymity: Alliance, AnoNet, ANts P2P, Azureus, Entropy, Freenet, GNUnet, i2phex, Marabunta, MUTE, Nodezilla, Rodi, RShare, Share, Sumi, Tor, WASTE, Zultrax. If you know of any others, please let me know.
*note that I haven’t tried out all of the above mentioned software and I cannot guarantee all of it (or any of it) is spyware/malware free.
January 25th, 2007 at 4:48 pm
Anonymous P2P in Work Place and University | Websense bypass | Web proxy avoidance
Anonymous p2p can also to bypass corporate firewalls and proxies.
One client that you have not mentioned is kerjodano p2p, a type of anonymous bit torrent.
I am currently testing kerjodando p2p on this page ( http://www.itsdargens.com/swarm/show_one/66e9b69841ab84096cd197c88419cec3 ) click START KERJODANDO to download the Java client (answer yes to questions) and connect to the test swarm.
You can also set up your own swarms to test.
There is no need to register or log in to use this website.
As an experiment I tried to use kerjodando p2p file sharing client in my work place behind the firewall and a websense proxy.
A difficult environment for p2p file sharing similar to that faced by many university students.
Kerjodando p2p (an ANts p2p mod originally developed by Italian student Gwren, Roberto Rossi) connected and I could upload and download files.
Moreover the connection was secure, encrypted and “anonymous” (friend to friend so IP address hidden as file location not linked to IP address as in ordinary file sharing applications).
Generally, to connect to a p2p file sharing network you need to meet three conditions:
1. Your IP address needs to be externally visible to the internet
2. You need an open communications port
3. You need access to the internet to upload and download
Kerjodando p2p met these three contions as follows:
1. When you click on a swarm “start” link at the swarm index site http://www.itsdargens.com/ the p2p client automatically downloads and sets up your external IP address even if you’re behid a firewall, NAT or proxy.
2. Kerjodando p2p spoofs SSL and uses port 443. So if you can surf the internet then it will connect and you can file share. Port 80 and 443 are used for web surfing.
3. Again if you can surf the internet via a browser you can file share. You just need to set-up kerjodando p2p in the same way that the browser was set-up. In my case I looked in the Options|Advanced|connections and found the proxy port and address. I then entered these into kerjodando’s proxy setting.
The great thing about this is that while you’re file sharing it looks like you either using VOIP, SSL FTP or a secure connection to a website.
So all those students at Zeropaid.com who think that they have been locked out of file sharing now can do it in a secure way.
January 27th, 2007 at 4:32 am
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