Turtle was a
free
Free may refer to:
Concept
* Freedom, having the ability to do something, without having to obey anyone/anything
* Freethought, a position that beliefs should be formed only on the basis of logic, reason, and empiricism
* Emancipate, to procur ...
anonymous peer-to-peer network project being developed at the
Vrije Universiteit in
Amsterdam, involving professor
Andrew Tanenbaum. It is not developed anymore. Like other anonymous P2P software, it allows users to share files and otherwise communicate without fear of legal sanctions or censorship. Turtle's claims of anonymity are backed by two research papers provided in the "external links" below.
Architecture
Technically, Turtle is a
friend-to-friend (
F2F) network - a special type of peer-to-peer network in which all your communication goes only to your friends, and then to their friends, and so on, to the ultimate destination.
The basic idea behind Turtle is to build a
P2P overlay on top of pre-existing trust relationships among Turtle users. Each user acts as node in the overlay by running a copy of the Turtle client software. Unlike existing P2P networks, Turtle does not allow arbitrary nodes to connect and exchange information. Instead, each user establishes secure and authenticated channels with a limited number of other nodes controlled by trusted people (friends).
In the Turtle overlay, both queries and results move hop by hop; the net result is that information is only exchanged between people that trust each other and is always encrypted. Consequently, a snooper or adversary has no way to determine who is requesting / providing information, and what that information is. Given this design, a Turtle network offers a number of useful security properties, such as confined damage in case of node compromise, and resilience against denial of service attacks.
See also
*
giFT
A gift or a present is an item given to someone without the expectation of payment or anything in return. An item is not a gift if that item is already owned by the one to whom it is given. Although gift-giving might involve an expectation ...
*
Internet privacy
*
File sharing
*
F2F
*
RetroShare (inspired by "Turtle Hopping" feature)
External links
Turtle homepage (student's project, 2004)Petr Matejka's master thesis on Turtle(2004)
"Safe and Private Data Sharing with Turtle: Friends Team-Up and Beat the System""Turtle: Safe and Private Data Sharing" from Usenix 2005 conference* Turtle is also cited by this articl
from the "Applied Public Key Infrastructure: 4th International Workshop: Iwap 2005" and by this articl
from the "11th International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems (ICPADS'05) "
{{File sharing
Anonymity networks
Internet privacy software
File sharing networks
File sharing software
Free routing software
Free network-related software
Free software programmed in C++