2014-roos-measuring
findings extracted from this paper
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In a 140-hour measurement, requests forwarded into a 10-node Darknet connected to the Opennet by a single bridge link succeeded only 0.08% of the time, versus 8.46% for Opennet-forwarded requests — a ~100× failure-rate gap caused by ID-space isolation between the two overlay segments.
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An 8-week measurement in June–August 2012 discovered 58,571 unique Freenet installations across 102,376 distinct IP addresses; approximately 25% were in the US and 12.5% in Germany, with Europe and North America collectively representing the vast majority — users from countries typically associated with Internet censorship were a small minority.
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Freenet's deployed Opennet topology uses uniformly random long-range contacts rather than Kleinberg-optimal distance-proportional selection, yielding an average routing length of 37.17 hops in simulation; adopting a 1/d distance distribution (r=1) reduces this to fewer than 13 hops — a 2.9× improvement achievable via a Kademlia-style bucket system.
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Freenet users exhibit a median session length of 95–99 minutes (p=0.975–0.99), substantially longer than all measured P2P file-sharing systems (1–60 minutes for Napster, Gnutella, FastTrack, Overnet, BitTorrent, KAD); ~2% of sessions exceeded 100 hours, and the distribution is best modeled by a lognormal fit (residual error 0.019) rather than Weibull or exponential.
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The FNPProbeRequest message, designed to return location and uptime of a node sampled via an 18-hop Metropolis-Hastings random walk, can be used to reliably track individual node online times — capturing >98% of online nodes per sampling interval — enabling intersection attacks on anonymity even though it cannot target a specific node by design.