As part of our encrypted messaging application Bleep, we wanted to make it possible for peers to locate each other securely using only the BitTorrent distributed hash table (DHT). To support this we added some DHT extensions which we’re now open sourcing under the name Scout. Scout is useful for applications where small groups of…

Recently, Florian Adamsky presented a paper at a USENIX Workshop on Offensive Technologies. The paper reported on a study his team conducted on the possibility of exploiting BitTorrent protocols for Distributed Reflective Denial of Service Attacks (DRDoS). The risk being that an attacker could exploit a user unknowingly and have them direct traffic to a…

Today marks the next step toward a distributed web with the beta release of Project Maelstrom. With Project Maelstrom, we aim to deliver technology that can sustain an open internet; one that doesn’t require servers, that allows anyone to publish to a truly open web, and that uses the power of distributed technology to scale…