Friend-to-friend

Part of a series on
File sharing
Technologies
Peer to peer File hosting services Web hosting
Networks and protocols
BitTorrent Direct Connect eDonkey Freenet GNUnet Gnutella / (2) RetroShare ZeroNet
Development and societal aspects
Timeline Legality BitTorrent issues
Non-public file sharing
Anonymous P2P Friend-to-friend Darknet Private P2P
Websites and services
1337x ExtraTorrent isoHunt OpenBitTorrent Rarbg The Pirate Bay Torrent Project
Clients
uTorrent Transmission Streaming Popcorn Time Torrents-Time Butter Project
Academic/scholarly
Sci-Hub Library Genesis ICanHazPDF
By country or region
Canada Japan Singapore UK
Related
PeerBlock Comparison of BitTorrent sites

A friend-to-friend (or F2F) computer network is a type of peer-to-peer network in which users only make direct connections with people they know. Passwords or digital signatures can be used for authentication.

Unlike other kinds of private P2P, users in a friend-to-friend network cannot find out who else is participating beyond their own circle of friends, so F2F networks can grow in size without compromising their users' anonymity. Retroshare, WASTE, GNUnet, Freenet and OneSwarm are examples of software that can be used to build F2F networks, though RetroShare is the only one of these configured for friend-to-friend operation by default.

Many F2F networks support indirect anonymous or pseudonymous communication between users who do not know or trust one another. For example, a node in a friend-to-friend overlay can automatically forward a file (or a request for a file) anonymously between two friends, without telling either of them the other's name or IP address. These friends can in turn automatically forward the same file (or request) to their own friends, and so on.

Dan Bricklin coined the term "friend-to-friend network" in 2000.^[1]

Potential applications of F2F

• The Bouillon project uses a friend-to-friend network to assign trust ratings to messages.^[2]
• The Ripple monetary system is a friend-to-friend network system for electronic money.

See also

• Darknet
• LAN messenger
• Private P2P

References

• B.C. Popescu, B. Crispo, and A.S. Tanenbaum. "Safe and Private Data Sharing with Turtle: Friends Team-Up and Beat the System." In 12th International Workshop on Security Protocols, Cambridge, UK, April 2004.
• T. Chothia and K. Chatzikokolakis. "A Survey of Anonymous Peer-to-Peer File-Sharing." In Proceedings of the IFIP International Symposium on Network-Centric Ubiquitous Systems (NCUS 2005), Nagasaki, Japan, volume 3823 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 744-755. Springer, 2005.
• J. Li and F. Dabek. "F2F: Reliable Storage in Open Networks." In 5th International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS '06), Santa Barbara, CA, USA, February 2006.
• M. Rogers and S. Bhatti. "How to Disappear Completely: A Survey of Private Peer-to-Peer Networks." In 1st International Workshop on Sustaining Privacy in Collaborative Environments (SPACE 2007), Moncton, NB, Canada, July 2007.
• Numbered references:

External links

Look up friend-to-friend in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Friend2Friend.net, An XML scripting language for writing F2F software
• Discussion about F2F involving Ian Clarke of Freenet
• F2F page at altruists.org
• Ripple: P2P money for trusted social networks
• Bouillon project website at the Wayback Machine (archived July 16, 2010)