This is a collection of links to academic papers about Freenet and related theoretical problems. See also the papers section of the main website.

See also GNUnet's papers section for more papers on related topics.

Disclaimer: Currently, a reference only appears in one section. However, ideas are not related to each other in a hierarchically ordered tree, so please do browse freely when looking for stuff. (To discuss whether to put the same reference in multiple sections, see the talk page.)

Table of Contents Freenet Darknet Presentations Origins Network topology Small-world networks Other peer to peer stuff

2010 (preprint) Private Communication Through a Network of Trusted Connections: The Dark Freenet : This was rejected by peer review, mostly because we haven't fixed the Pitch Black attack.

2007-05 Switching for a small world : A thesis by Vilhelm Verendel exploring ways to optimise the swapping algorithm.

2005 Video of Small World talk, Berlin, December 2005 : This is a video of a talk given by Ian Clarke and Oskar Sandberg at the Chaos Computer Congress in Berlin, December 2005, describing the (then) new architecture for Freenet 0.7. You can also download the slideshow, and the source for the Java demo (requires Java 1.5).

2005-12 Distributed routing in Small World Networks : A paper by Oskar Sandberg describing the theoretical basis for the new "Darknet" routing mechanism employed by Freenet 0.7.

2005 Chaos Computer Congress Talk : This is a slideshow for a talk given at the Chaos Computer Congress on 30th Dec 2005 in Berlin, Germany by Ian Clarke and Oskar Sandberg. It described the new "darknet" approach to be employed in Freenet 0.7. A Java demonstration to accompany the talk is also available.

Routing in the Dark: Pitch Black (citeseer link) : A paper describing some attacks on Freenet 0.7's location swapping algorithm.

2003 Next Generation Routing Algorithm : This article describes Freenet's "Next Generation" routing algorithm. This was a novel approach which had nodes making routing decisions based on sophisticated analysis of the time required to route previous requests. This algorithm was promising, but was eventually dropped in favour of a much simpler approach in Freenet 0.7.

• http://www.cs.usask.ca/~brr628/papers/Freenet_Architecture.ppt
• http://www.ics.forth.gr/dcs/Activities/Projects/p2p/ploumid-freenet.ppt
• http://www.cs.bu.edu/groups/aces/OLD/Freenet.ppt
• http://www-net.cs.umass.edu/cs791n/freenet.ppt

2002 Protecting Freedom of Information Online with Freenet : An IEEE Internet Computing article describing the Freenet architecture circa 2002 - probably the best introduction to the theory behind Freenet.

2001 Freenet: A Distributed Anonymous Information Storage and Retrieval System : The original paper by Ian Clarke, Oskar Sandberg, Brandon Wiley, and Theodore W. Hong.

1999 FreeNet White Paper : Original white paper by Ian Clarke, Division of Informatics, University of Edinburgh 1999.

2005-01 Searching in a Small World : Oskar Sandberg's licentiate thesis describing a simple decentralized mechanism for constructing small world networks that is inspired by Freenet's original design. Part II of the thesis describes the basis for the new Darknet architecture.

2000-08 Navigation in a Small World, J. Kleinberg

1999 The small-world phenomenon: An algorithmic perspective, J. Kleinberg

2007 RFC4981: A literature survey of p2p networks focusing on robustness. Talks about all sorts of p2p's, including various DHT variants, and various keyword search systems. Freenet (and FASD) are criticized on the grounds that 1000 nodes needs 20 hops for fetching average data but hundreds of hops for the bottom quartile; this is based on very old published Freenet papers, modern Freenet will likely be much better than this; WE NEED TO GET THE PAPER OUT! Some interesting stuff on distributed keyword search, also explains why mapping physical/IP locations to network locations is unpopular ("Proximity Identifier Selection"); this may be relevant to attempts to assign darknet locations on Sneakernet.