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| Retroshare | |
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| Original author | Robert Fernie |
| Developers |
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| Initial release | 2006; 19 years ago (2006)[1] |
| Stable release | 0.6.7[2]  / 30 November 2023 |
| Repository | github |
| Written in | C++ |
| Operating system | Linux,Windows,macOS,Android,FreeBSD,OpenBSD,NetBSD,Haiku |
| Platform | Cross-platform |
| Available in | 38 languages[3] |
List of languages English, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan (Spain), Chinese (China), Chinese (Taiwan), Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, Galician (Spain), German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Macedonian, Malayalam, Norwegian Bokmål, Occitan, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese | |
| Type | Anonymous P2P,friend-to-friend,chat,instant messaging,newsgroups,voice over IP,email client andBBS |
| License | GNU General Public License |
| Website | retroshare |
| Part ofa series on |
| File sharing |
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Video on demand sites |
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Development and societal aspects |
Retroshare is afree and open-sourcepeer-to-peer communication andfile sharing app based on afriend-to-friend network built byGNU Privacy Guard (GPG).[4] Optionally peers may exchangecertificates andIP addresses to their friends and vice versa.[5][6]
Retroshare was founded in 2004 by Mark Fernie.[7] An unofficialbuild for thesingle-board computerRaspberry Pi, named PiShare, was available since 2012.[8]
On 4 November 2014, Retroshare scored 6 out of 7 points on theElectronic Frontier Foundation'ssecure messaging scorecard, which is now out-of-date. It lost a point because there had not been a recent independentcode audit.[9]
In August 2015, Retrosharerepository was migrated fromSourceForge toGitHub.[10] In 2016,Linux Magazine reviewed security gaps in Retroshare and described it as "a brave effort, but in the end, an ineffective one."[11]
Retroshare is aninstant messaging andfile-sharing network that uses adistributed hash table for address discovery. Users can communicate indirectly through mutual friends and request direct connections.[12]
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After initial installation, the user generates a pair of (GPG)cryptographic keys with Retroshare. Afterauthentication and exchanging anasymmetric key,OpenSSL is used to establish a connection, and forend-to-end encryption. Friends of friends cannot connect by default, but they can see each other, if the users allow it.IPv6 was released in November 2018.
It is possible to share folders between friends.[13] File transfer is carried on using a multi-hop swarming system (inspired by the "Turtle Hopping" feature from theTurtle F2F project, but implemented differently). In essence, data is only exchanged between friends, although it is possible that the ultimate source and destination of a given transfer are multiple friends apart. A search function performing anonymous multi-hop search is another source of finding files in the network.
Files are represented by theirSHA-1hash value, andHTTP-compliant file and links may be exported, copied, and pasted into/out of Retroshare to publish their virtual location into the Retroshare network.
Retroshare offers the following services for communication:
The core of the Retroshare software is based on an offline library, into which two executables are plugged:
Thefriend-to-friend structure of the Retroshare network makes it difficult to intrude and hardly possible to monitor from an external point of view.[citation needed][14] The degree of anonymity may be improved further by deactivating theDHT and IP/certificate exchange services, making the Retroshare network a real dark net.[15]
Friends of friends may not connect directly with each other; however, a user may enable the anonymous sharing of files with friends of friends. Search, access, and both upload and download of these files are made by "routing" through a series of friends. This means that communication between the source of data (the up-loader) and the destination of the data (the down-loader) is indirect through mutual friends. Although the intermediary friends cannot determine the original source or ultimate destination, they can see their very next links in the communication chain (their friends). Since the data stream is encrypted, only the original source and ultimate destination are able to see what data is transferred.
While Retroshare's encryption makes it virtually impossible for anISP or another external observer to know what one is downloading or uploading, this limitation does not apply to members of the user's Retroshare circle of trust; adding untrusted people to it may be a potential risk.[16][better source needed]
In 2012, a German Court granted an injunction against a user of Retroshare for sharing copyrighted music files. Retroshare derives its security from the fact that all transfers should go through “trusted friends” whom users add. In this case, the defendant added the anti-piracy monitoring company as a friend, which allowed him to be traced through aggregation of badOpsec.[17]
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