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From Pfyshnet

[edit] Welcome Pfyshnet is a secure public anonymous peer to peer network and distributed file-system. Publishers, searchers, readers, as well as content holders are all protected. Pfyshnet features secure keyword tagging and search, and provides protection from physical seizure of participating computers. For more technical information refer to the Documents section. Features: You can safely and anonymously upload and download large files using the Pfyshnet distributed file-system. Files can be safely associated with search keywords others can use to find the files. Keyword searches are also protected by strong security. Current GUI provides message boards along with standard search, upload, download. [edit] News 09/06/2009 - Still reviewing the code. I updated the homepage a little, and posted to sourceforge help wanted. 08/25/2009 - I can't stay away from Pfyshnet. I've got some great ideas about improving performance, memory, and bandwidth usage. However, first I plan on doing a code review. It's been a while sense I've even looked at it, and I've forgotten a lot of the details. I figure I'll have a fresh perspective on it now, and I'll be able to see something I may have previously missed. 10/22/2008 - Our patron fell on hard times and has pulled the plug on the seed servers we were using for Pfyshnet. Pfyshnet requires at least 20 nodes to form the "base" of the network. Until we can achieve this again.. Pfyshnet is down. If you are willing to run a full time node or can sponsor seed servers let us know. (masequis - at - yahoo - . - com) News Archive

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/ / CC BY 2.0

Goals

Security of transactions. Uploaders, Downloaders, and Data Facilitators must be protected from their transactions.

This goal must be maintained assuming some fraction of participating nodes are subversively working in collusion, and that all network traffic between participants is visible to the attacker. This is the highest priority and no compromise outside of the necessity for practicality will be made at the expense of this goal. Note, security from participation is NOT a goal. That is the goal of a darknet. Protection of Data Facilitators excludes the use of public exit points from the network. These serve as legal and technological attack points. Specific entry points for data should also be avoided. These also serve as legal and technological attack points.

Anyone at anytime can participate in the network given a computer and Internet connection.

It should be a public network, not a private darknet. Darknets require existing relationships with others already participating. This would exclude a large portion of the population that would like to participate but know of no other people already participating or willing to participate. Darknets place too much trust in finite and untrustworthy human associations.

Trust is dispersed over a user defined number of nodes.

Trust is based on the probability that some faction of nodes known are NOT evil. The plain text of the transaction must not be revealed until it has passed through enough nodes that the user is comfortable with the probability it has passed through a trustworthy node as compared to the risk of the transaction. This is one of the biggest problems with many anonymous peer to peer networks. Requests and transactions are plain text to immediate nodes. The legal recourse is that you could simply be passing the request through from someone else. However, for some networks an immediate node could perform statistical analysis of the transactions to yield a fairly strong certainty of a user's general network activity.

No centralization.

Centralization is very tempting, especially given the previous goals. There are many benefits including performance, reliability, and security. However, centralization provides a small number of attack points to cripple or completely disable the entire network. Proper centralized servers can also be expensive, requiring solicitation for donations, or other money making schemes such as advertisements.

The original goals where outlined in masequis' blog. There you can find comments and thoughts on other anonymous peer to peer networks.