Hello,
I am attempting to develop truely anonymous file transfers for gnutella. This issue must eventually be addressed to ensure the future of the network. I know many developers feel it is a waste of time because it cannot be implemented using the gnutella protocol but I am attempting to theorize a way to overcome this limitation. How about this:


File transfers are not done over a tcp transport, instead a seperate "push" protocol (using udp or invent a new one that uses ip packets) is set up where the source address can be bogus.

IP Addresses are not sent back with Query hits. Instead when a client want to download a file it sends its ip to the conenction it recevied the hit from and that peer is responisble informing the peer with the file to start pushing the file using a bogus source address. The recevieng client would never respong the the file pushes to avoid disrupting arp tables.

Will something like this work? Mainly I am interested in anyone being able to tell me if using bogus addresses in udp or another made up transport is not possible using the ip protocol. Is this a good idea?

This is not workable. - How would you make a transfer stop once it has started and you don't want it to continue? All you could do would be dropping the UDP (or whatever) packets (without saving any bandwidth) since you could not tell the sending host to stop.

The thing is even though you may not put the IP address in your packets but TCP/IP does so the IP of the person downloading could still be obtained. Even if you used UDP there are still other issues.