Re: Alternative for anonymity

On Sunday 03 October 2004 08:02 am, calhounc-theA2l61zFxXfO9P/[email protected] wrote:
> The way freenet insures anonymity of both the producer and the consumer of
> information is by making it difficult or impossible for anyone to determine
> whether the computer to/from which they are sending/receiveing a request is
> the actual originator/destination of the request. Freenet's method of
> accomplishing anonymity results in non-hierarchical addressing of data
> which means that finding the data essentially involves a node to node
> search that could, in the worst case, require that all but one node be
> searched. While it is true that the propogation of data resulting from
> transparent copying following a successful search will make future searches
> potentially shorter, as the size of the network grows it will become more
> and more dificult for less popular (though not necessarily les important)
> data to be found. Another result of not having a hierarchical addressing
> scheme for data is that the data becomes uneditable, even by it's author.
> While many clever answers have been proposed to alleviate some of the
> problems caused by a non-hierarchical addressing scheme for data, it seems
> evident from a philisophical point of view that as long as nodes only know,
> at most, the direction in which a particular piece of data used to lie (and
> that only if they have encountered a successful search for the data
> previously), no algorithm will provide routing choices much more efficient
> than random guessing.
>
> Other anonimity services, such as the Anonimizer, use central servers which
> act as proxy servers for their subscribers. The problem with these services
> is that even if both the producers and consumers of information subscribe
> to these proxy servers, the proxy servers themselves are aware of identity
> of their subscribers and thus can be "attacked" in an effort either to
> eliminate a source of anonimity or to acquire the identities of the
> subscribers.
>
> However, suppose that there were nodes who connected to each other using
> existing "tunnelling" technology thus creating a VPN. Suppose further that
> these nodes used existing NAT routing technology and acted as NAT routers
> for the nodes with which they are connected. With proper protocol design,
> it would be imposible to tell whether a request originated with a given
> node or whether it was simply acting as a relay node for some other node.
> In this way data would be stored using hierarchical addressing, namely the
> IP address of the computer which is storing, knowingly or unknowingly, the
> data, thus solving the problems resulting from non-hierarchical addressing.
> Additionally, since the addressing scheme is the same as that used by the
> "regular" internet, interaction with this already existing network of data
> becomes much more simplified. Would this arrangement not succeed in
> providing both anonimity and ease in locating data?

That is being done. www.i2p.net
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