My OperaProtect your privacy, part 3: Anonymous networks
Monday, October 9, 2006 9:45:25 PM
There's few ways to further protect your privacy. Anonymous networks are one of the most effective ones. Of course none of these networks guarantee absolute anonymity. Maybe most useful where freedom of speech is really threatened, or surveilance goes too far. Otherwise you can access vast amount of knowledge much faster through public unencrypted network. But if you're bit paranoid...
Imagine you could publish or access anything and nobody could track you down.
Freenet is anonymous network providing distributed storage. Information is stored in pieces in several nodes over the network. Nodes don't know nature of the data they're storing and those pieces are replicated further if there's enough requests. So it's hard to remove popular files from the network, unpopular just vanish over time.
From version 0.7 and newer, Freenet doesn't help you to find nodes you to access the network and you need to find at least three by yourself. Good thing about that is, that you can add friends you can trust as nodes. That is very important in cases where simply using Freenet will cause trouble.
But if you connect only to your friends, how will you access information that's only available from complete stranger? I'm not actually sure if I understand how the routing algorithm works. One paper described how Freenet arranges nodes with similar interests closer to each other, but that paper described algorithm that was abandoned, so I'm not sure how it works now. It should use theory of small world networks as its basis.
I2P doesn't have distributed storage, so server that has the page you want is either up or down. Nature of the network allows using almost any protocol (there's for example builtin BitTorrent client) and it allows almost realtime communication between nodes. To achieve more anonymity you can give more bandwidth for routing traffic from other nodes, so it's harder to know which data is originating from your node.
Most unique feature of Tor is that it can offer outproxy to nodes in the network, so people can access public Internet through Tor as long as there's at least one outproxy running. Tor allows also running server inside the network to hide identity of who is running the server. Tor might be most popular and faster than two previously mentioned, but that means that it can't protect your anonymity so well. But if it's fast and easy to use, it's not a suprise it's the most popular one. There's for example Firefox based package named Torpark, Opera based OperaTor and few LiveCDs that include Tor.
So is there any reson to justify existance of any of these services? Freenet provides storage which doesn't depend on goodwill of any corporation, if content gets popular distributed network just makes more copies. Anonymous nature of network allows anonymous publication of information that you might despise and might be illegal. Only way to defend against distribution such information is to not to look for it. That doesn't stop others distributing it though, but at least parts of those files won't so easily end up on your computer.
It's quite interesting point though, if goverment tries to ban some material on Freenet, they end up making sure that it's available by requesting it. Publisher of the information is impossible to find, unless information itself has some clues.
All three prevent anyone knowing who do you contact by using traffic analysis. Normal SSL connection to your bank protects anyone from getting the information you are transmitting, but somebody who can capture the message knows where it is coming from and where it is going to. EFF (organization that has developed Tor) has actually good overview why we should protect ourselves against traffic analysis.
Is the world better place if any kind of information can travel free? Or should these networks be banned altogether as they can be used to distribute highly unmoral material? Or is world now in such state that there are some things that can't be discussed unless it can be done completely anonymously? Of course that depends on where you live in, but are things getting worse in western world too which is considered free (or at least from western point of view)? Or are all people using such networks criminals?
Imagine you could publish or access anything and nobody could track you down.
Freenet is anonymous network providing distributed storage. Information is stored in pieces in several nodes over the network. Nodes don't know nature of the data they're storing and those pieces are replicated further if there's enough requests. So it's hard to remove popular files from the network, unpopular just vanish over time. From version 0.7 and newer, Freenet doesn't help you to find nodes you to access the network and you need to find at least three by yourself. Good thing about that is, that you can add friends you can trust as nodes. That is very important in cases where simply using Freenet will cause trouble.
But if you connect only to your friends, how will you access information that's only available from complete stranger? I'm not actually sure if I understand how the routing algorithm works. One paper described how Freenet arranges nodes with similar interests closer to each other, but that paper described algorithm that was abandoned, so I'm not sure how it works now. It should use theory of small world networks as its basis.
I2P doesn't have distributed storage, so server that has the page you want is either up or down. Nature of the network allows using almost any protocol (there's for example builtin BitTorrent client) and it allows almost realtime communication between nodes. To achieve more anonymity you can give more bandwidth for routing traffic from other nodes, so it's harder to know which data is originating from your node. Most unique feature of Tor is that it can offer outproxy to nodes in the network, so people can access public Internet through Tor as long as there's at least one outproxy running. Tor allows also running server inside the network to hide identity of who is running the server. Tor might be most popular and faster than two previously mentioned, but that means that it can't protect your anonymity so well. But if it's fast and easy to use, it's not a suprise it's the most popular one. There's for example Firefox based package named Torpark, Opera based OperaTor and few LiveCDs that include Tor.So is there any reson to justify existance of any of these services? Freenet provides storage which doesn't depend on goodwill of any corporation, if content gets popular distributed network just makes more copies. Anonymous nature of network allows anonymous publication of information that you might despise and might be illegal. Only way to defend against distribution such information is to not to look for it. That doesn't stop others distributing it though, but at least parts of those files won't so easily end up on your computer.
It's quite interesting point though, if goverment tries to ban some material on Freenet, they end up making sure that it's available by requesting it. Publisher of the information is impossible to find, unless information itself has some clues.
All three prevent anyone knowing who do you contact by using traffic analysis. Normal SSL connection to your bank protects anyone from getting the information you are transmitting, but somebody who can capture the message knows where it is coming from and where it is going to. EFF (organization that has developed Tor) has actually good overview why we should protect ourselves against traffic analysis.
Is the world better place if any kind of information can travel free? Or should these networks be banned altogether as they can be used to distribute highly unmoral material? Or is world now in such state that there are some things that can't be discussed unless it can be done completely anonymously? Of course that depends on where you live in, but are things getting worse in western world too which is considered free (or at least from western point of view)? Or are all people using such networks criminals?
(30%)
