First, thank you for creating this project. When I was a young high school student in China, I tried all different kind of tools to evade internet censorship, including Freenet (although admittedly with little success, there was never enough peers to connect to and/so it was too slow to download anything meaningful).
My question is whether freenet is designed to be resistant for active adversaries with deep packet inspection capability, particularly like the Chinese firewall that is also observed to do statistical timing analysis of packets? Is there any possibility to apply obfuscation to the peer to peer connection? And is there any mechanism to aide peer discovery (DHT?)
> First, thank you for creating this project.
You're welcome :)
> My question is whether freenet is designed to be resistant for active adversaries with deep packet inspection capability, particularly like the Chinese firewall that is also observed to do statistical timing analysis of packets? Is there any possibility to apply obfuscation to the peer to peer connection?
Freenet's transport protocol is a custom encrypted protocol over UDP, but it is not currently designed to evade sophisticated deep packet inspection or timing analysis by state-level adversaries like the Great Firewall.
That said, the transport layer is modular, and we would absolutely accept contributions adding traffic obfuscation or pluggable transports, subject to the usual tradeoffs around latency, bandwidth overhead, and resource usage.
> And is there any mechanism to aid peer discovery (DHT?)
Freenet uses a distributed small-world routing topology for peer discovery and efficient message propagation. It isn't a conventional Kademlia-style DHT, but conceptually it serves a similar purpose.
The network is designed to self-organize into a small-world topology.[1]
[1] See the "Distance" graph at the bottom-right of the circle visualization - http://nova.locut.us:3133/