An Encoding for Censorship-Resistant Sharing

This paper describes ECRS, a content encoding scheme for censorship-resistant peer-to-peer networking. The proposed encoding mechanism supports both efficient dissemination of encrypted data as well as encrypted queries over this data. Intermediaries can verify that an encrypted response matches an encrypted query without being able to decrypt either. Furthermore, ECRS allows users to share files encrypted under descriptive keys which are the basis for querying the network for content. With the proposed scheme, effective load balancing and swarm distribution are possible. The encoding mechanism handles data in small chunks, which can also be efficiently encoded on demand from the plaintext. The proposed encoding is conceptually simple and easy to implement.

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