Off-Topic@Heyuri

The Failed Darknet That Was Doomed From The Start

A darknet is an encrypted or hidden network or area within the internet that requires special software or techniques in order to access. While they are usually created with the intention of offering free speech, circumventing content bans, and protecting journalists and whistleblowers, they attract every kind of criminal and malicious actor due to their location concealing and anonymization capabilities. They are also wealth-building attractions, as they open up new vectors of earning money online, and enable other people who generally have difficulty earning money, such as minors and felons, to have more financial opportunities without government oversight.

The overwhelming majority of people who get busted as a result of engaging in illegal activities on darknets are the result of user error; they made mistakes or had faulty OPSEC which led to their arrests. It is rarely the anonymizing software which protects them that fails. But sometimes, it does indeed happen.

While Tor and i2p have stood the test of time as being secure and anonymous networks as they have had minimal de-anonymizing exploits, the same cannot be said for all darknets. Particularily Freenet (now known as Hyphanet), which has many flaws and experienced a plethora of exploits that can deanonymize users. There are very good reasons as to why Freenet was never a big name in darknet culture and in the realm of online drug trafficking.

Freenet was created in the year 2000 with the intention of providing a peer-to-peer free speech and file sharing platform that is both anonymous and resistant to censorship. Much like other anonymity-centered networks, all user traffic through Freenet is encrypted and routed through a series of nodes. However, unlike Tor and i2p, every computer connected to the Freenet network acts as a node in some way, which enables the storing and transmission of encrypted data to and from other users on the network, which means that data can remain accessible when particular nodes become inaccessible (particularily those belong to users who initially uploaded the data). Website on the network are called “freesites”.

It offers three modes of connection: “opennet”, “darknet”, and “mixed”. When using opennet, the default mode in Freenet, users connect to arbitrary nodes on the network, whereas users connect only to selected nodes they trust in darknet mode. Mixed mode is where users connect to both random and trusted nodes.

Freenet uses hashes as keys, which are used to verify the integrity and authenticity of data on the network, identifying and retrieving data, and to protect the anonymity of users and publishers.

While Freenet shares some similarities to Tor and i2p, it has several flaws in its design and virtually no advantages over those two networks whatsoever. Since every node on the network is treated as a peer, it is highly susceptible to Sybil attacks, where a a malicious actor sets up as many nodes as they desire to manipulate the network, gain disproportionate control over its resources, and potentially deanonymize its users. Tor and other anonymizing networks aren’t entirely immune to Sybil attacks, but Freenet’s design, which requires every computer to act as a node in some way, and its relatively small user base make it far more prone to this type of attack compared to other networks. All computers on the opennet have encrypted data from other users stored on them to make it accessible to other users, which presents another issue as innocent users can have highly illegal content stored on their PCs that is fully encrypted, and they may never be aware of it.


Using hashes as keys opens up more vulnerabilities; dictionary attacks (an attacker can try to guess the key by iterating through all possible combinations of characters until they find the correct key), lack semantic closeness (there is no notion of semantic closeness when speaking of key closeness, making it difficult for users to find related content or navigate the network effectively), potential for collisions (SHA-256 might be strong hash function, but there is still a possibility of collisions, where two different inputs produce the same output, which can lead to confusion and potential security issues, as users may accidentally access or decrypt the wrong content), and difficulty managing keys (users must ensure that their keys are not shared with unauthorized parties, which can be difficult because users must know the keys to access content).

Furthermore, there have been vulnerabilities found in its underlying software which have been patched, though the team has a history of not announcing the vulnerabilities to make users aware of them so they can protect themselves, but quietly patching them instead, demonstrating a lack of transparency from the developers. And law enforcement agencies have claimed that they run a series of Freenet nodes

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