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Simple, Anonymous File Sharing

MUTE File Sharing is a peer-to-peer network that provides easy search-and-download functionality while also protecting your privacy.

MUTE File Sharing compiles as a fast, native application for many platforms (no Java, no Python, etc.).

Encryption

Neighbor connections in the MUTE network are built on top of secure streams that use:

* RSA public/private keys (size selected by user at runtime) to exchange secret keys
* AES (Rijndael) 128-bit secret keys used in CFB mode with all-zero initialization vectors to encrypt stream data
* Separate AES keys used for each stream direction
* Fresh AES keys used each time a new stream is established

Routes in the MUTE network are not encrypted end-to-end. Because of person-in-the-middle attacks during a routed key-exchange, secure end-to-end encryption is impossible in an anonymous network. There are more details here.

Routing Tables

MUTE's ant-inspired backrouting algorithm uses routing tables to track which neighbor connections are associated with particular sender addresses. For example, we might receive a series of messages from Alice, and these messages might be sent to us through three out of our five neighbor connections. When we receive messages addressed to Alice, we should route them back through the neighbors associated with messages from Alice. Given that we might receive messages from Alice through more than one neighbor, various algorithms can be used to decide which neighbor to send a particular message through.

MUTE uses a probabilistic algorithm for backroute selection. For each recently seen sender address, MUTE keeps a queue of pointers to recent neighbor connections on which we have received messages from that sender. For example, we might track the last 100 neighbors that sent us messages from Alice. If we are tracking three sender addresses (Alice, Bob, and Eve), and we have five neighbors (numbered 1 to 5), our routing table might look like this: