Darknet file sharing : application of a private peer-to-peer distributed file system concept

Abstract: Peer-to-peer network applications has been a tremendous success among end users and has therefore received much attention in academia and industry, as have illegal public file sharing in media. However, private peer-to-peer file sharing between family, friends and co-workers have attracted little interest from the research community. Existing approaches also limit the users by not allowing for native interaction with userspace applications. In this paper we ex- -plore how private file sharing can be made safe, fast and scalable without constraining the users in this aspect. We demonstrate the concept of a private file sharing application utilizing a decentralized peer-to-peer network overlay by creating a prototype with extreme program- ming as methodology. To maximize the freedom of users the network is accessed through a virtual file-system interface. The prototype proves this to be a valid approach and we hope readers can use this paper as a platform for further developments in this area.