Re: general gnutella security question

Here's the original work that QRP evolved out of:
http://aeolusres.homestead.com/files/index.html

Our early writings on the issue:
http://www.limewire.com/developer/query_routing/keyword%20routing.htm

Thanks
-greg

Quoting Sam Berlin <[email protected]>:

> 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
>