Re: general gnutella security question

Hi Miguel,

> The second reason is security. Am I
> correct that the main purpose of hashing the key words is that other peers
> don't know the exact names of the files that a peer is sharing? In that way,
> the protocol can avoid untrusted peers get knowledge of what legal or ilegal
> files the peer is sharing? and is it for the purpose of not only hiding
> ilegal stuff, but also avoiding any kind of attacks?

I wasn't involved in the creation of QRP, but from what I've gathered,
this is just a common misconception.  Remember that the creation of
Ultrapeers (and by association, query routing tables) in the first
place was a response to the meltdown of Gnutella due in large part to
too many modem-users hindering traffic flow.  This can be extended
also to slow machines with not much memory, and other generally
poor-performing factors.  QRP is a lightweight mechanism that takes a
very large piece of information and whittles it down (as bloom filters
do) to a manageable piece of information, in terms of storing, looking
up, transferring, and more.  The initial design goal was to have it
propagate many hops, so size and manageability were likely key.  In
reality, the bits only traveled a single hop, which lent itself to
even more optimizations that would have been thrown out the window if
the entire listings were transferred.

So, although from the surface it seems that security and other factors
might have been a part of the introduction, I don't believe they
actually were.

Sam