Hi, ex-Freenet developer here.

[email protected]:
> Is the extra traffic desirable in Tor? Reading asn's comment, I was under
> the impression that you are interested in adding higher latency traffic
> such as Freenet or mixnets for better anonymity:
> https://blog.torproject.org/blog/crowdfunding-future-hidden-services
> 

Running Freenet-over-Tor would not improve Tor's anonymity; it's just running 
another application on top of Tor. (This and the below also apply for 
Freenet-over-I2P)

Tor might give Freenet some additional privacy, but I think it would only 
really be useful in darknet mode:

In opennet mode, this is inherently open to certain Sybil attacks, and it 
doesn't matter if you don't know your freenet-neighbours' actual IP addresses. 
These Sybil attacks work on the Freenet layer, against the structure of the 
Freenet overlay network, and it doesn't matter what you run below it (e.g. 
Tor). However, you might benefit from having your IP address being hidden from 
your neighbours, which in this mode Freenet picks unpredictably (to a human).

In darknet mode, you're supposed to connect to people you trust under some 
"social relationship" (the threat model assumes the connection graph is 
distributed like a social network). In this case, Tor might be able to 
partially hide your Freenet social graph, which would otherwise be obvious to 
anyone sniffing your traffic. But if your Freenet social graph becomes "too 
similar" to another public social graph (such as your facebook friends, or some 
other source) then one can do graph comparison attacks to identify your Freenet 
node as you, even if its physical location is unknown.

What is really needed is some actual careful mathematical modelling and 
analysis. The stuff I just wrote, are just *wild guesses* and I have no idea if 
they are *actually true* or not. If people want this field to advance, this is 
the sort of work that should be happening - research, understanding, and 
modelling of the theoretical topics involved.

I don't mean to diminish what you did, but simply running A on top of B doesn't 
mean you get the combined security benefit of both tools. Freenet today is also 
generally lacking in formal and precise analysis, and it's unclear what the 
security goals are exactly.

X

-- 
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git://github.com/infinity0/pubkeys.git
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