P2PRIV

Last updated April 30, 2019

Peer-to-peer direct and anonymous distribution overlay (P2PRIV) was a conceptual anonymous peer-to-peer overlay network introduced at Warsaw University of Technology in 2007.^[1] P2PRIV hides an initiator of communications by a parallelization of network nodes receiving or sending user data independently. This concept is contrary to other anonymity networks topologies. The anonymity networks employ a serial communication as a common basis and hide the initiator in a cascade of network nodes forwarding user data consecutively. The main advantage of P2PRIV is viewed as a possibility of providing high-speed anonymous data transfer while anonymous data can be sent directly and independently in the distributed network.

An overlay network is a computer network that is built on top of another network.

Warsaw University of Technology institute of technology in Poland

The Warsaw University of Technology is one of the leading institutes of technology in Poland and one of the largest in Central Europe. It employs 2,453 teaching faculty, with 357 professors. The student body numbers 36,156, mostly full-time. There are 19 faculties (divisions) covering almost all fields of science and technology. They are in Warsaw, except for one in Płock.

Description

P2PRIV separates anonymization from user data transport. Before sending data, signalization tokens are forwarded over classical anonymous cascades towards formation of so-called cloning cascades (CC). The well-known anonymous techniques (i.e. Mix network and Crowds' Random walk algorithm) are utilized in hiding the initiator of the CC. Then, after a random interval of time, each CC member (i.e. group of clones and the true initiator) communicates directly and independently with destination nodes. A process of finding the true initiator among network nodes is hard to perform even for an adversary able to collude a significant part of overlay network.

Mix networks are routing protocols that create hard-to-trace communications by using a chain of proxy servers known as mixes which take in messages from multiple senders, shuffle them, and send them back out in random order to the next destination. This breaks the link between the source of the request and the destination, making it harder for eavesdroppers to trace end-to-end communications. Furthermore, mixes only know the node that it immediately received the message from, and the immediate destination to send the shuffled messages to, making the network resistant to malicious mix nodes.

Crowds is a proposed anonymity network for anonymous web browsing. The main idea behind Crowds anonymity protocol is to hide each user's communications by routing them randomly within a group of similar users. Neither the collaborating group members nor the end receiver can therefore be sure where in the group the packet originated. Crowds was designed by Michael K. Reiter and Aviel D. Rubin. It defends against internal attackers and a corrupt receiver, but provides no anonymity against a global attacker or a local eavesdropper. Crowds is vulnerable to the predecessor attack; this was discussed in Reiter and Rubin's paper and further expanded in "The Predecessor Attack: An Analysis of a Threat to Anonymous Communications Systems" by Matthew K. Wright, Micah Adler, And Brian Neil Levine. Crowds introduced the concept of users blending into a crowd of computers.

A random walk is a mathematical object, known as a stochastic or random process, that describes a path that consists of a succession of random steps on some mathematical space such as the integers. An elementary example of a random walk is the random walk on the integer number line, $, which starts at 0 and at each step moves +1 or -1 with equal probability. Other examples include the path traced by a molecule as it travels in a liquid or a gas, the search path of a foraging animal, the price of a fluctuating stock and the financial status of a gambler: all can be approximated by random walk models, even though they may not be truly random in reality. As illustrated by those examples, random walks have applications to engineering and many scientific fields including ecology, psychology, computer science, physics, chemistry, biology as well as economics. Random walks explain the observed behaviors of many processes in these fields, and thus serve as a fundamental model for the recorded stochastic activity. As a more mathematical application, the value of π can be approximated by the use of random walk in an agent-based modeling environment. The term random walk was first introduced by Karl Pearson in 1905.$

Weaknesses

P2PRIV requires a fully distributed network with distributed information content to assure high-anonymous access to its resources. A utility of P2PRIV in client-server like services, e.g., World Wide Web system, or in hybrid P2P topologies, is problematic in its current form.

The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information space where documents and other web resources are identified by Uniform Resource Locators, which may be interlinked by hypertext, and are accessible over the Internet. The resources of the WWW may be accessed by users by a software application called a web browser.

Related Research Articles

Freenet is a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant communication. It uses a decentralized distributed data store to keep and deliver information, and has a suite of free software for publishing and communicating on the Web without fear of censorship. Both Freenet and some of its associated tools were originally designed by Ian Clarke, who defined Freenet's goal as providing freedom of speech on the Internet with strong anonymity protection.

Gnutella is a large peer-to-peer network. It was the first decentralized peer-to-peer network of its kind, leading to other, later networks adopting the model. It celebrated a decade of existence on March 14, 2010, and has a user base in the millions for peer-to-peer file sharing.

Peer-to-peer type of decentralized and distributed network architecture

Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application. They are said to form a peer-to-peer network of nodes.

A distributed hash table (DHT) is a class of a decentralized distributed system that provides a lookup service similar to a hash table: pairs are stored in a DHT, and any participating node can efficiently retrieve the value associated with a given key. Keys are unique identifiers which map to particular values, which in turn can be anything from addresses, to documents, to arbitrary data. Responsibility for maintaining the mapping from keys to values is distributed among the nodes, in such a way that a change in the set of participants causes a minimal amount of disruption. This allows a DHT to scale to extremely large numbers of nodes and to handle continual node arrivals, departures, and failures.

Crypto-anarchism is a form of anarchy accomplished through computer technology. Crypto-anarchists employ cryptographic software to evade persecution and harassment while sending and receiving information over computer networks, in an effort to protect their privacy, their political freedom, and their economic freedom.

BitTorrent is a communication protocol for peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P) which is used to distribute data and electronic files over the Internet.

GNUnet is a software framework for decentralized, peer-to-peer networking and an official GNU package. The framework offers link encryption, peer discovery, resource allocation, communication over many transports and various basic peer-to-peer algorithms for routing, multicast and network size estimation.

An anonymous P2P communication system is a peer-to-peer distributed application in which the nodes, which are used to share resources, or participants are anonymous or pseudonymous. Anonymity of participants is usually achieved by special routing overlay networks that hide the physical location of each node from other participants.

Dark Net is an umbrella term describing the portions of the Internet purposefully not open to public view or hidden networks whose architecture is superimposed on that of the Internet. "Darknet" is often associated with the encrypted part of the Internet called Tor network where illicit trading takes place such as the infamous online drug bazaar called Silk Road. It is also considered part of the Deep Web.. Anonymous communication between whistle-blowers, journalists and news organisations is facilitated by the "Darknet" Tor network through use of applications including SecureDrop.

A friend-to-friend computer network is a type of peer-to-peer network in which users only make direct connections with people they know. Passwords or digital signatures can be used for authentication.

Java Anon Proxy, also known as JAP or JonDonym, is a proxy system designed to allow browsing the Web with revocable pseudonymity. It was originally developed as part of a project of the Technische Universität Dresden, the Universität Regensburg and Privacy Commissioner of Schleswig-Holstein. The client-software is written in the Java programming language.

anoNet is a decentralized friend-to-friend network built using VPNs and software BGP routers. anoNet works by making it difficult to learn the identities of others on the network allowing them to anonymously host IPv4 and IPv6 services.

A computer network is a digital telecommunications network which allows nodes to share resources. In computer networks, computing devices exchange data with each other using connections between nodes. These data links are established over cable media such as wires or optic cables, or wireless media such as Wi-Fi.

Turtle was a free anonymous peer-to-peer network project being developed at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, involving professor Andrew Tanenbaum. It is not developed anymore. Like other anonymous P2P software, it allows users to share files and otherwise communicate without fear of legal sanctions or censorship. Turtle's claims of anonymity are backed by two research papers provided in the "external links" below.

Tribler is an open source decentralized BitTorrent client which allows anonymous peer-to-peer by default. Tribler is based on the BitTorrent protocol and uses an overlay network for content searching, which makes the program operate independently of external websites and renders it immune to limiting external action such as government restraint. Due to this overlay network, Tribler does not require an external website or indexing service to discover content. The user interface of Tribler is very basic and focused on ease of use instead of diversity of features. Tribler is available for Linux, Windows, and OS X.

A gossip protocol is a procedure or process of computer peer-to-peer communication that is based on the way that epidemics spread. Some distributed systems use peer-to-peer gossip to ensure that data is routed to all members of an ad-hoc network. Some ad-hoc networks have no central registry and the only way to spread common data is to rely on each member to pass it along to their neighbors.

Perfect Dark (P2P) peer to peer software

Perfect Dark (パーフェクトダーク) is a peer-to-peer file-sharing (P2P) application from Japan designed for use with Microsoft Windows. It was launched in 2006. Its author is known by the pseudonym Kaichō. Perfect Dark was developed with the intention for it to be the successor to both Winny and Share software. While Japan's Association for Copyright of Computer Software reported that in January 2014, the number of nodes connected on Perfect Dark was less than on Share, but more than on Winny, Netagent in 2018 reported Winny being the largest with 50 000 nodes followed by Perfect Dark with 30 000 nodes followed by Share with 10 000. Netagent asserts that the number of nodes on Perfect Dark have fallen since 2015 while the numbers of Winny hold steady. Netagent reports that users of Perfect Dark are most likely to share books/manga.

Tor is free and open-source software for enabling anonymous communication. The name is derived from an acronym for the original software project name "The Onion Router". Tor directs Internet traffic through a free, worldwide, volunteer overlay network consisting of more than seven thousand relays to conceal a user's location and usage from anyone conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis. Using Tor makes it more difficult to trace Internet activity to the user: this includes "visits to Web sites, online posts, instant messages, and other communication forms". Tor's intended use is to protect the personal privacy of its users, as well as their freedom and ability to conduct confidential communication by keeping their Internet activities from being monitored.

A wireless onion router is a router that uses Tor to connect securely to a network. The onion router allows the user to connect to the internet anonymously creating an anonymous connection. Tor works using an overlaid network which is free throughout the world, this overlay network is created by using numerous relay points created using volunteer which helps the user hide personal information behind layers of encrypted data like layers of an onion. Routers are being created using Raspberry Pi adding a wireless module or using its own inbuilt wireless module in the later versions.

References

External links

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[1] ttps://web.archive.org/web/20120528230440/http://p2priv.org/news/website_launched

[2] ttps://web.archive.org/web/20120528230440/http://p2priv.org/news