Differences between Freenet and Tahoe

[marlowe]

In #tahoe-lafs, erniejunior asked

"hi guys short question. is tahoe as secure and anonymous as freenet? what are the differences?"

This ticket is to add the answer to FAQ.rst

[gwern]

Seems like an easy answer. I don't know everything about Tahoe or Freenet, but I read a few papers. Here is my shot, sans formatting or anything:

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Tahoe and Freenet aim at different goals: Tahoe aims at spreading content which could be anything, while Freenet aims at spreading some content which could be spread by anyone.

If you insert a file into Freenet, it will be next to impossible to trace it back to your node, or for anyone who figure out who has downloaded it through Freenet. However, by default Freenet does not keep the file contents a secret; anyone can look at the file plaintext. (Freenet's papers are explicit about this: the encryption on the filestore is perfectly breakable and the purpose is to provide *plausible denialability*.) To get secrecy of the file content, you would need to encrypt it and transmit the key separately; to get FEC/redundancy, you would need to explicitly generate and insert the split files, etc. As well, Freenet nodes expire and delete unpopular content, so no persistence is guaranteed. (It's not a good idea to try to put your backups onto Freenet.)

In contrast, content inserted into a Tahoe network is heavily encrypted to the user's private keys; anyone else, like an attacker, can easily reassemble the split components of the encrypted file into the full encrypted file (that is the point!) but what do they do with this encrypted file? Nothing. However, an attacker can easily watch transfers between Tahoe nodes and figure out who inserted the file and likely who has downloaded it. Tahoe does not, like Tor or Freenet do, seek to confuse watchers with randomized junk traffic or carefully encrypted connections between nodes. Tahoe offers integrity of content, secrecy of content, longevity of content - but not anonymity of content.

[zooko]

I posted a long letter about this: ​http://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2011-July/006560.html

[zooko]

Fixed by this edit to the FAQ