Freenet: A Distributed Anonymous Information Storage and Retrieval

Freenet: A Distributed Anonymous Information Storage and Retrieval System Presentation by Theodore Mao [email protected] CS294-4: Peer-to-peer Systems August 27, 2003

Topics Overview Architecture GUID Keys Routing Network Evolution Storage Performance Planned Improvements Related Work Conclusion/Questions

Overview (1/2) What is Freenet? Who is behind Freenet? Freenet is a P2P application designed to ensure true freedom of communication over the Internet. It allows anybody to publish and read information with complete anonymity. Originally, Ian Clarke while a student at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Still supervised by Ian Clarke, though many other people contribute to the project. How recent is Freenet? Original paper appeared in 1999. According to CiteSeer, it has been cited 195 times.

Overview (2/2) Purpose: Prevent information censorship Maintain personal privacy Goals: Privacy for information producers, consumers, and holders Resistance to information censorship High availability and reliability through decentralization Efficient, scalable, and adaptive storage and routing

Architecture Peer-to-peer network Participants share bandwidth and storage space Each file in network given a globally-unique identifier (GUID) Queries routed through steepestascent hill-climbing search

GUID Keys Calculated with an SHA-1 hash Two main types of keys Content-hash keys Used primarily for data storage Generated by hashing the content Signed-subspace keys (SSK) Intended for higher-level human use Generated with a public key and (usually) text description, signed with private key Can be used as a sort of private namespace Description e.g. politics/us/pentagon-papers

SSK Generation and Query Example Generate SSK: Need: public/private keys, chosen text description Sign file with private key Query for SSK: Need: public key, text description Verify file signature with public key Public Key Description Hash Hash Concatenate Hash SSK Key

Routing (1/2) Every node maintains a routing table that lists the addresses of other nodes and the GUID keys it thinks they hold. Steepest-ascent hillclimbing search TTL ensures that queries are not propagated infinitely Nodes will occasionally alter queries to hide originator

Routing (2/2) Requesting Files: Nodes forward requests to the neighbor node with the closest key to the one requested Copies of the requested file may be cached along the request path for scalability and robustness Inserting Files: If the same GUID already exists, reject insert – also propagate previous file along request path Previous-file propagation prevents attempts to supplant file already in network.

Network Evolution Adding nodes: Announce public key and physical address (e.g. IP) to an existing node Announcement is recursively forwarded to random nodes Nodes in the chain then collectively assign the new node a random GUID Route training: As more requests are processed, nodes should specialize in handling a few parts of the key space

Storage LRU file elimination when out of disk space Possibly encrypted data (by content publisher), so that data holders can claim to be ignorant of the content they store (plausible deniability)

Performance Some real-world and simulated data available, but generally hard to test Hard to tell the size of the network Nodes are all anonymous

Planned Improvements Next-Generation Routing (NGR) Make Freenet nodes much smarter about deciding where to route information Collect statistical information for each node in its routing table, e.g. response times, successful responses, etc. Use this information to improve routing decisions

Related Work File-sharing: Gnutella, FastTrack, Overnet Consumer Anonymity: Anonymizer, SafeWeb/Triangle Boy Producer Anonymity: Rewebber, TAZ, Publius Shared-storage: OceanStore, Cooperative File System, PAST

Conclusion (1/3) Primary Points Prevention of censorship and protection of privacy is an important and active field of research. Freenet is a (successful?) implementation of a system that resists information censorship Freenet is an ongoing project that still has plenty of flaws There may be a tradeoff between network efficiency and anonymity, robustness.

Conclusion (2/3) What’s wrong with Freenet? Not well tested in the wild – scalability, resilience. Insertion flooding is one way to take out the network. Anonymity guarantees not that strong – “Most non-trivial attacks would probably be successful in identifying someone making requests on Freenet.” No search mechanism – a standard search would allow attacks to take out specific content holders Suffers from problems of establishing initial network connection.

Conclusion (3/3) More information at http://freenetproject.org/ Questions? Comments?