Freenet : A Distributed Anonymous Information Storage and Retrieval System in Designing Privacy Enhancing Technologies

We describe Freenet a peer to peer network application that permits the publication replication and retrieval of data while protecting the anonymity of both authors and readers Freenet operates as a network of identical nodes that collectively pool their storage space to store data les and cooperate to route requests to the most likely physical location of data No broadcast search or centralized location index is employed Files are referred to in a location independent manner and are dynamically replicated in locations near requestors and deleted from locations where there is no interest It is infeasible to discover the true origin or destination of a le passing through the network and di cult for a node operator to determine or be held responsible for the actual physical contents of her own node