Why GNUnet?

Posted Dec 5, 2005 0:08 UTC (Mon) by grothoff (guest, #34319) [Link]

Ok, so GNUnet pre-dates TOR. However, comparing with TOR, the
goals are a bit different. TOR is the onion router, so it does
not provide anonymity against an adversary who can do good
traffic analysis (because TOR is low-latency). GNUnet is, by
design, higher-latency and thus should protect better against
such an adversary. Also, TOR is primarily used to anonymize
HTTP (or TCP) traffic. As a result, it has problems with exit
nodes: you run a TOR node, and now some people will start to
see strange traffic (spam, port-scans, accesses to internal
websites) on their servers that originate from your machine,
and they may ask you (more or less politely) what you are doing.
And then you'll have to explain to them, why you run a TOR node
(btw, I do run one and I have gotten complaints like that).

GNUnet does not have this exit node problem since GNUnet peers
go through some pains to ensure that they cannot really be tricked
into sending (lots of) traffic to machines that do not run
GNUnet. Of course, that also means that you will not be able to
access random webpages via GNUnet (also, the latency would probably
spoil that anyway).

Now, comparing to Freenet (and the FAQ has some brief comparisson),
well, GNUnet tries to improve on many things Freenet does. The
ECRS encoding is in our opinion technically superior to Freenet's
CHK, SKS and KSK keys. The way we route gives better anonymity.
GNUnet gives economic incentives. GNUnet supports swarming. And
the list goes on.

Now, comparing to Freenet (and the FAQ has some brief comparisson),
well, GNUnet tries to improve on many things Freenet does. The
ECRS encoding is in our opinion technically superior to Freenet's
CHK, SKS and KSK keys. The way we route gives better anonymity.
GNUnet gives economic incentives. GNUnet supports swarming. And
the list goes on.

Anyway, while I'm at it, here's what's wrong with Edge's expectations.
He's evaluating a beta version after a major code overhaul with
changes to the protocol and encoding at a time where there are
pretty much no binaries out there for any platform and expects to
find lots of content. Well, good luck. New protocol means new
nodes will not talk to the old peers. New encoding means any content
that used to be available will not be available again until people
explicitly re-insert it. And major code overhaul means that 0.7.0a
fixed several dozen bugs that were new in 0.7.0 which prevented
connections, reduced performance or just simply crashed the daemon.
There's a reason why we're trying to keep a low profile for the
moment: we know that there are still problems that need to be
addressed, and that takes time -- especially since we don't have
full-time (or even part-time) paid developers.

GNUnet at this time is not for the faint of heart, that's why it is
a beta. If you don't want to sink quite a bit of time into getting
it to work (and then helping us further the project), this is not
the time to try it out. If you think improving anonymous peer-to-peer
is something you want to work on, check us out. Otherwise, you may
want to wait until a binary for GNUnet 1.0.0 is out for your platform.