OneSwarm

OneSwarm is a privacy-preserving P2P client developed at the University of Washington. Although backward compatible with traditional BitTorrent clients, OneSwarm also includes new features designed to protect user privacy when sharing data among friends through creating a distributed darknet, so-called friend-to-friend sharing.

OneSwarm is based on the Azureus (Vuze) BitTorrent client.

History

Oneswarm is still very much in Beta testing, but its development started as far back as 2007 as a branch of the Azureus codebase.

Feature development and debugging has been slow in spite of its open source nature, but by 2010 the codebase was stable enough to support a nearly constant swarm of 200,000+ users.

A separate Friends server codebase was developed in early 2009 to allow users to keep track of each other. So far very few Friends servers have been deployed by those involved with the technology.

Features

Features of OneSwarm beyond the privacy aspects of the product: file search, sharing permissions, web UI with streaming, real-time transcoding, and remote access.

To provide privacy, OneSwarm uses source-address rewriting with multi-path routing and multi-source downloading.

Interface

OneSwarm's graphical user interface supports real-time transcoding of several video and audio formats. It is web-based and can perform in-browser playback, thus making it easier for casual users to adapt.

See also

• Friend-to-friend
• Retroshare

• Anonymous P2P

External links

• Official website
• OneSwarm friend-to-friend P2P likely to irk Big Content, ISPs, ars technica (2009)
• OneSwarm network improves file-sharing control, anonymity, beta news (2009)
• (French) French OneSwarm community : Darkswarm
• (French) French OneSwarm community : F2F-Fr
• (Russian) Russian OneSwarm community