Privacy-Preserving P2P Data Sharing with OneSwarm

Privacy - the protection of information from unauthorized disclosure -
is increasingly scarce on the Internet. The lack of privacy is
particularly true for popular peer-to-peer data sharing applications
such as BitTorrent where user behavior is easily monitored by third
parties. Anonymizing overlays such as Tor and Freenet can improve user
privacy, but only at a cost of substantially reduced performance. Most
users are caught in the middle, unwilling to sacrifice either privacy
or performance.  In this paper, we explore a new design point in this
tradeoff between privacy and performance. We describe the design and
implementation of a new P2P data sharing protocol, called OneSwarm,
that provides users much better privacy than BitTorrent and much
better performance than Tor or Freenet. A key aspect of the OneSwarm
design is that users have explicit configurable control over the
amount of trust they place in peers and in the sharing model for their
data: the same data can be shared publicly, anonymously, or with
access control, with both trusted and untrusted peers. OneSwarm's
novel lookup and transfer techniques yield a median factor of 3.4
improvement in download times relative to Tor and a factor of 6.9
improvement relative to Freenet. OneSwarm is publicly available and
has been downloaded by hundreds of thousands of users since its
release