Anonymous Bittorrent

Anonymous P2P: The act of running a P2P client/server in such a way that an attacker can not determine who is running the P2P client, what their IP address is, real name, etc. It has been possible for over ten years to do this with e-mail, via clients such as mixmaster, and the numerous lawsuits filed by powerful government and corporate entities against those running Mixmaster and other Remailers? has demonstrated that it is possible to build a military grade anonymous network. At this point, military grade anonymity is not available for p2p, but there ares some promising technologies that can provide protection against basic structured threats, such as lawsuits and non-governmental attackers. Traffic is still likely with most of the technologies, but non-governmental threats do not generally have access to resources to carry out through traffic analysis.

Regardless of the current shortcomings of Anonymous P2P clients, the use of technologies to anonymize P2P may be the "killer app" for anonymous technologies. So far, anonymous networking meshes and applications have focused on protocols such as SMTP and HTTP, allowing users to send e-mail and "browse" the Internet with significant privacy and, in some case, extremely strong anonymity. However, the widespread adoption of these technologies, even though they have been around for over 10 years, has not occured. On first glance, it appears that for most users, anonymous e-mail and web browsing are not pressing enough concerns to warrant the use of technologies which can achieve that end.

Further, only recently has the community of researchers in the anonymous communication field taken an interest in largest sets of protocols beyond e-mail and web services. There are now "high latency" anonymizing technologies for things such as Instant Messaging, IRC, SSH, telnet and FTP. In the last few years, interest in P2P clients that provide some level of anonymity has taken off with the development of several P2P clients that create their own anonymizing meshes. As impressive as these clients may be, its more likely that a technology which allows users to use their current non-anonymous P2P clients (such as eDonkey, Kazaa, Bittorrent, and others) in a total anonymous way will take hold. As it would happen, in at least one case, Bittorrent, it is now possible to use a mainstream P2P client with an anonymizing software package to have it both ways. In the present case, that technology is the I2P anonymous network, and specially modified bittorrent client that uses the I2P proxy to route its traffic over.

Given the huge community of P2P users, and the high probability that those users will see a real need for anonymity it becomes clear that anonymity and P2P make for a good combination. Anonymous meshes benefit from large communities of users (anonymity of the crowd), and the P2P community is possibly one of the largest "crowds" on the Internet (some estimates put Bit Torrent at 1/3 of all the traffic on the Internet at the end of 2004).

Anonymizing Software/Anonymous networks

These software packages do not seek to replace P2P clients, or to even be P2P clients, these clients/software packages actually help create an entire anonymous network over which many protocols, in additional to some P2P protocols can flow.

http://www.anonymous-p2p.org/ (cache)

Anonymous P2P discussion and software list (cache)