peer 2 peer and the darkside
I was originally looking around for a preexisting methodology of peer to peer networking that would suit my upcoming game engine. It needed to be able to function without a central server, have low peer lookup times, and the network had to be resilient to outages. As usual I was sidetracked by interesting forms of peer to peer architectures. I found two interesting articles which I shall highlight.
Overnet
I discovered the Overnet two years too late. It was an interesting lead, a preexisting implementation of DHT methodology, combined with the now defunct eDonkey network. The Overnet was a true serverless network. Nodes that wanted to connect would query a preexisting peer list or get new initial peers via the eDonkey net. The Overnet-ish system is still in use today, but for other things than file sharing.
Storm botnet
One of the most prevalent uses of the Overnet still in use today, is the Storm botnet. It is a remotely-controlled network of “zombie” computers (or “botnet”) that has been linked by the Storm Worm, a Trojan horse spread through e-mail spam (Wikipedia). The size of it is staggering, with conservative estimates at 160,000 to a more agreed upon 1 million. The crazy part is the amount of bandwidth that 1 million geo-diverse DSL lines could throw at a host. 1 million computers * a mid-range DSL line (256kbps) = 244.14 Gbps = a whole lot of bandwidth. I am not really scared, because I don’t pick fights with multinational spam corporations. What I find amazing is how peer to peer architectures can scale so much.
