Waste

Encyclopedia : W : WA : WAS : Waste

WASTE is a peer-to-peer and friend-to-friend protocol and software application developed by Justin Frankel at Nullsoft in 2003. The name WASTE is a reference to Thomas Pynchon's novel The Crying of Lot 49, in which it is an acronym for "We Await Silent Tristero's Empire". In the novel, W.A.S.T.E. is an underground postal service. After its release, WASTE was removed from distribution by AOL, Nullsoft's parent company. The original page was replaced with a statement claiming that the posting of the software was unauthorised and that no lawful rights to it were held by anyone who had downloaded it, in spite of the original claim that the software was released under the GNU General Public Licence. No new betas have been released since March 2005, and few if any minor releases.

Contents

1 Description
2 Strengths
3 Shortcomings
4 References
5 See also
6 External links

Description

WASTE behaves similarly to a virtual private network by connecting to a group of trusted computers, as determined by the users, however this kind of network is commonly referred to as a darknet. It employs heavy encryption to ensure that third parties cannot decipher the messages being transferred. The same encryption is used to transmit and receive instant messages, chat, and files, maintain the connection, and browse and search. There is also an optional "Saturate" feature which adds random traffic, making traffic analysis more difficult. The nodes (each a trusted connection) automatically determine the lowest latency route for traffic and, in doing so, load balance. This also improves privacy, because packets often take different routes.

A "WASTE ring" can be formed by individuals sharing their RSA public keys and connecting to the ring (private and public keys are generated by WASTE from the random seeds of mouse movement). Once someone can see one person in the ring, that person can see everyone's virtual ID (nicknames and public key hashes) in the ring as long as the default setting for public keys to be shared among trusted hosts remains true.

The suggested size for a WASTE ring is 10-50 nodes.

WASTE listens to incoming connections on port 1337. This was chosen because of 1337's leet connotations.

A cross-platform (including Linux, Mac OS and Microsoft Windows) beta version of WASTE using the WxWidgets toolkit is now available.http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=82356

VIA Technologies released a fork of WASTE under the name PadlockSL, but removed the product's website after a few weeks. The user interface is written in Qt and the client is available for Linux and Windows.

Strengths

Secured through the trade of RSA public keys, allowing for safe and secure transfers with trusted hosts.

Shortcomings

No forwarding cache: when a user forwards a file between 2 friends, he doesn't keep a copy of this file in a cache. So the next time someone asks for this file, he has to download it again. This can lead to big scalability problems when users communicate through long chains of in-between nodes. Note that this is, in some respects, a security feature, providing a measure of deniability about earlier transactions.
The cross-platform beta version (based on wxWidgets) is currently very immature.

References

External links