Tribler anonymous downloads are fast

Only 330KByte/sec is unacceptable for our video streaming use-case. Currently our GCM cypto or other bottleneck is slowing things down. slow anonymous downloads: Crypto CPU bottleneck #1882

Tribler users never seed naked in Bittorrent swarms.

Bittorrent swarms offer no protection, they leave people exposed and naked. Hidden seeding is the default in Tribler for sharing content and cannot be disabled. This ensures sufficient content becomes available with strong privacy in our darknet. Hidden seeding requires connectability of rendezvous and introduction points.

Tribler can download from both hidden seeders and existing Bittorrent swarms.

Tribler offers the best of both worlds. It always prefers downloading from hidden seeders using end-to-end encryption. If there are no hidden seeders available, you can anonymously download from normal Bittorrent seeders. Tribler offers this fallback option by default after trying for 180 seconds. This feature can be disabled easily if you prefer pure darknet-only downloads. Fallback option background: anonymous seeding and public-swarm fallback policies #885

Tribler users never become an exit node, unless they explicitly volunteer.

Our smooth backwards compatibility with Bittorrent comes with the cost of exposure in existing Bittorrent swarms. We need volunteers to run "exit nodes". These are the peers that receive encrypted messages from the darknet and unencrypted messages from Bittorrent peers. Running an exit node has proven to be a risky non-trivial task for the main Tor community. Lawyer-based attacks are very real for exit node volunteers. Ideally, only a single copy of each piece of content needs to be relayed by our exit nodes. If content is "pulled into the darknet" we can switch to end-to-end encryption and rely on hidden seeding. Ticket: No longer serve by default as an "Exit node" flag #1174 @rjruigrok

long-term tit-for-tat for anonymity

Develop an open community to disseminate sharing ratio of participants. You need to help and relay traffic of others. Related experimental work in the Tor community: GoldStar, PAR, BRAIDS, LIRA, TEARS, and TorCoin (Tribler Tickets: partly Bartercast statistics community #1230, also Rewarding good behavior #5)

Collective intelligence around reliability of anonymous relay partners

Share with the rest of the network who is actively helping others and who is freeriding. Introduce a Bitcoin-like accounting system. Instead of pointless hashing we use proxy helping bandwidth as our proof-of-work. Our protocol follows the Tor specification as much as possible, our circuits have a maximum lifetime of 10 minutes and also terminate after 55MByte of traffic (security limiters). Similar to private Bittorrent communities we use the sharing ratio to identify freeriders. Double signed signature record is created after proxy helping. These proof-of-work records are shared in the community (like Bitcoin public ledger). Each peer builds a database with the reliability of their neighbors, visualize in a graph (locally; no central accountant, controlling server). Rewarding good behavior #5

real-time statistics of your relaying contributions and tunnel ratio

Notify users they are freeriding and disable anonymous downloading. Be harsh, Tribler is only for social people!

real-time anonymous tunnels reliability statistics

Each member of the collective measures their perception of network performance and shows it to the user. Advanced programmer-minded feature and debugging. Add to the Tribler debug screen how many unique neighbors have been seen. Measure the proxy bandwidth donations and online duration (reliability) of yourself and neighbors. Show broken tunnel events. Show overall tunnel + hidden seeding reliability and performance for a tunnel tests and 50MB downloads.

improved anti-spam measures, family filter accuracy and metadata in general

Toward a Youtube-like experience within Tribler. With just as reliable metadata. @LipuFei

credit mining for anonymous seeding

Automatically boost poorly seeded anonymous swarms. Maximize the yield of your bandwidth by automatically detecting and anonymous seeding of swarms. Youtube-like streaming focus and auto-seeding #573 Anonymous seeding and rewards experiments #655 1 TByte of seeding #21, running code: Credit investments test: donate 1 TByte anonymously #23

darknet mode: deny any connection with strangers

Here we start to deviate fundamentally from the random-circuit building approach, used in Tor. In our fully distributed setting it is difficult to protect yourself from various kind of attacks, like the Sybil attack. By not accepting connections from strangers we constrain a lot of attack classes. Every Tribler user that has a healthy set of neighbors to relay traffic with shall not interact with strangers.

DTLS

Besides our existing onion encryption we need additional point-to-point encryption. This is not needed for simple lawyer-based adversaries or snooping ISPs, but for more advanced attackers.