OneSwarm: A secure and private P2P

Posted on July 17, 2009 at 5:17 am

Although widely used, currently popular peer-to-peer (P2P) applications offer no user privacy. By design, services like BitTorrent and Gnutella share data with anyone that asks for it, allowing a third-party to monitor user behavior.

As a result, using a P2P network means that your online activities become public knowledge and can be traced.

OneSwarm is a new peer-to-peer tool developed from Washington University. Instead of sharing data indiscriminately, data shared with OneSwarm can be made public, it can be shared with friends, shared with some friends but not others, and so forth.

They call this friend-to-friend (F2F) data sharing. OneSwarm is:

Privacy preserving: OneSwarm uses source address rewriting to protect user privacy.Instead of always transmitting data directly from sender to receiver (immediately identifying both), OneSwarm may forward data through multiple intermedaries, obscuring the identity of both sender and receiver. This is like using Bit torrent with anonymous proxies.
User friendly: OneSwarm’s interface is web-based and supports real-time transcoding of many audio and video formats for in-browser playback, eliminating the need for casual users to master a new application’s interface or search for custom media codecs.
Open: OneSwarm is freely available and built on existing standards. OneSwarm can operate as a fully backwards compatible BitTorrent client, and its friend-to-friend data sharing features are built on cryptographic standards, e.g., X.509 certificates and SSL encryption.

It hooks up to your browser and then processes your torrent files.

The basics of OneSwarm are pretty simple. The software consists of a web service that appears to be written in J2EE (Java Enterprise Edition), allowing it to run on any OS.

All interactions with the OneSwarm system beyond that, however, take place in a user’s browser. The software is back-compatible with BitTorrent, meaning it functions fine as a standard P2P client.

Unlike your standard BitTorrent clients, this software’s specialty (or weakness) is adding a layer of social networking on top of P2P sharing. When first starting up on a user’s machine, OneSwarm creates a unique encryption key, which it uses to encrypt its IP address information.

Other users can only find you, and thus the files you share, if you’ve established a relationship with them. Although you can create these relations manually, OneSwarm could also open your Gmail contacts.

This use of an existing social network and encryption allows you to become private since no anonymous connections could enter your circle of friend network.