GNUnet 0.7.1pre2 review

GNUnet is a peer-to-peer framework with focus on providing security

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 1993K Developer: Christian Grothoff

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GNUnet is a peer-to-peer framework with focus on providing security. All peer-to-peer messages in the network are confidential and authenticated.

GNUnet provides a transport abstraction layer and can currently encapsulate the network traffic in UDP (IPv4 and IPv6), TCP (IPv4 and IPv6), HTTP, or SMTP messages.

GNUnet supports accounting to provide contributing nodes with better service. The primary service build on top of the framework is anonymous file sharing.

The goal of the GNUnet project is to provide an infrastructure for secure peer-to-peer networking. All communication in GNUnet is authenticated and link-to-link encrypted.

The economic model makes attacks on the network harder since the economics can be used to control resource usage. GNUnet peers exchange messages using a pluggable transport service abstraction. Currently, transport services based on UDP, TCP, HTTP and SMTP are available.

The GNUnet core provides mechanisms to perform resource allocations for CPU, bandwidth and storage space. The core enforces resource limitations set by the user. GNUnet does not rely on any centralized services.

New Peer-to-Peer protocols can be easily implemented on top of the basic GNUnet infrastructure. Current protocols include anonymous file sharing, a trivial chat protocol, message throughput benchmarking and network topology visualization.

Requirements:
GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD or Solaris.
GNU MP Bignum Library (>= 4.0.0)
libgcrypt (>= 1.2.0)
gtk+ (>= 2.0)
libextractor (>= 0.3.3)

Please keep in mind that this is a beta version. There may still be some stability, scalability and performance issues. So far the network is very small. Very little content is yet available. A subscription to GNUnet mailinglists might be a good idea.

What's New in This Release:
This release fixes various minor and major bugs, including a minor memory leak, deadlocks in gnunet-gtk, and bugs in the load computation code, which caused inefficient resource allocation.
A new ncurses/dialog-based setup wizard has been added.