29 July 13:15: Secure File-Sharing in the GNUnet Peer-to-Peer Framework

• Lecturer: Dr. Christian Grothoff, Assistant Professor of computer science a the University of Denver, Colorado
• Time: Tuesday, 29 July at 13.15
• Venue: Room B222 (Exactum building, 2nd floor), Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki

This talk will give an overview of GNUnet, GNU's framework for secure peer-to-peer networking. The talk will describe some of the key components of the system that are crucial for building new peer-to-peer applications on top of the existing framework. The focus of the talk will be on GNUnet's censorship-resistant file-sharing protocol.

GNUnet uses a new encoding scheme for censorship-resistant file-sharing (ECRS) that enables swarming, migration and fine-grained integrity checking by intermediaries without compromising sender or receiver anonymity or confidentiality of data. ECRS ensures that intermediares can not easily decrypt the queries or the content that they are transmitting.

GNUnet also uses incentives to reward peers that contribute resources to the network. Since ECRS allows the validation of replies by intermediaries, GNUnet can make local decisions about the character of peers without infringing on the anonymity of the users. GNUnet uses this to create an excess-based economic model to allocate resources to contributing peers at times where the network is resource constrained.

This is joint work with Nils Durner, Krista Grothoff, Heikki Lindholm, Tzvetan Horozov, J. T. Lindgren, Ioana Patrascu, and many others.

About the speaker:

Christian Grothoff is an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Denver, Colorado. He earned his PhD in computer science from UCLA, an M.S. in computer science from Purdue University, and both a Diplom II in mathematics and the first Staatsexamen in chemistry from the Bergische Universität Gesamthochschule (BUGH) Wuppertal. His research interests include compilers, programming languages, software engineering, networking and security.