Perfect Dark (P2P)
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| Perfect Dark | |
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_スクリーンショト.png/250px-Perfect_Dark_(ソフトウェア)_スクリーンショト.png) Screenshot of perfect dark |
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| Developed by | Kaichō (President (会長?)) |
| Latest release | version 1.020 "STAND ALONE COMPLEX" / March 31, 2008 |
| OS | Microsoft Windows |
| Available in | Japanese, English |
| Genre | File sharing |
| License | Closed source |
Perfect Dark is a Japanese peer-to-peer file-sharing (P2P) application designed for use with Microsoft Windows (not to be confused with the video game franchise Perfect Dark). Its author is known by the pseudonym Kaichō (Japanese for The Chairman (会長?)). Perfect Dark was developed with the intention for it to be the successor to both Winny and Share.[1] It is currently in an open testing phase, with frequent updates.
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[edit] Open Testing
Presently, since Perfect Dark is still being actively developed, the author does not ask that the program's users at this point become dedicated "users" of the software. Instead the author asks them to participate in the test phase. Through this test phase, the author hopes for bug reports and discussion that will help shape Perfect Dark into the most useful application possible.
In comparison to its predecessors Winny and Share, the bandwidth and hard drive space requirements have increased. The minimum upload speed required by perfect dark is 100KB/sec, and it also requires a minimum of 40GB of hard drive space for its unity (cache) folder.
[edit] Security
The overall structure of the Perfect Dark network broadly resembles recent versions of Freenet, only with more heavy use of distributed hash tables.
The anonymity relies on a mixnet where traffic is forwarded according to a certain probability, as well as the deniability of the distributed datastore ("unity"), which is stored and transferred in encrypted blocks, with the keys distributed separately.
Perfect Dark uses RSA (1024-bit) and AES (128-bit) to encrypt data transmitted between peers. Exchanged keys are cached for efficiency.
Published files and boards (including automatic updates from the author, where enabled) are usually signed with 160-bit ECDSA signatures. Automatic updates are additionally protected with a 2048-bit RSA signature.
The author believes that initially, a layer of obscurity due to the closed-source nature of the program will frustrate attempted attacks on the anonymity, as well as network degradation due to "free riders" and junk files; however, the author has stated that it may become open-source in the future should an acceptable solution to these problems be found.
