PDTP – The Peer Distributed Transfer Protocol

Presented at DEF CON 12 (2004), July 31, 2004, 6 p.m. (50 minutes).

Despite decades of evolution, Internet file transfer is still plagued with problems to which formalized solutions are either inadequate or nonexistent. Lack of server-side bandwidth often renders high demand content inaccessible (which we affectionately refer to as the Slashdot effect). When the ability of a single server to provide content is exceeded, manual mirror selection is often utilized, providing an unnecessary and often problematic experience for end users. No formalized cryptographic mechanism exists for preventing tampering of files located on a particular server, and consequently malicious individuals have managed to place trojans in the releases of many high profile open source applications.


Presenters:

  • Tony Arcieri - PDTP.org
    Tony Arcieri is a system administrator and programmer for the Pielke Research Group and Colorado Climate Center at Colorado State University. He has also contributed to a number of open source projects, including authoring the Ogg Vorbis plugin for XMMS, the cdcd and gdcd X11 CD player applications, and various contributions to other projects such as the Subversion version control system and the FreeBSD operating system.

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