Project Maelstrom: Forensic Analysis of the BitTorrent-Powered Browser
This addresses censorship resistance for users in restricted environments, but is incremental as it builds on existing BitTorrent technology.
The paper tackled the problem of analyzing Project Maelstrom, a peer-to-peer browser that enables decentralized website hosting resistant to takedowns, and found it raises censorship, security, and privacy issues due to its open distribution model.
In April 2015, BitTorrent Inc. released their distributed peer-to-peer powered browser, Project Maelstrom, into public beta. The browser facilitates a new alternative website distribution paradigm to the traditional HTTP-based, client-server model. This decentralised web is powered by each of the visitors accessing each Maelstrom hosted website. Each user shares their copy of the website's source code and multimedia content with new visitors. As a result, a Maelstrom hosted website cannot be taken offline by law enforcement or any other parties. Due to this open distribution model, a number of interesting censorship, security and privacy considerations are raised. This paper explores the application, its protocol, sharing Maelstrom content and its new visitor powered "web-hosting" paradigm.