I was wondering about encrypting peer-to-peer traffic and how easy this would be to implement.

1. Is it possible to encrypt the data transferred with a P2P client?

2. In the future is there going to be an encryption feature added to the gnutella?

This would be good, since all P2P traffic is not copyrighted material and if you want to use peer-to-peer in a company networks or in some professional commercial use the data transferred should be able to be in encrypted form. I believe that in the future there will be many professional applications running in P2P networks. Good examples of these are at the moment Groove (www.groove.net) and Skype (www.skype.com) applications.

When ISPs limit P2P traffic they usually inspect the content of the fraffic at layer7. In my sence this is morally ambiguous and against some laws atleast here in Finland. With encryption the user could have some certainty that his or hers privacy is taken care of.

ISPs are blocking P2P traffic mainly because 50-80% of ISP traffic is peer-to-peer traffic. This easily makes the network feel congested and unusable. There are however other solutions than inspecting traffic and prohibiting it altogether to make networks free of congestion. A finnish company is making a product called Staselog Network Equalizer (www.staselog.com) which uses traffic shaping and Quality of Service abilities to classify and prioritize traffic and share available bandwidth equally amongst the users. Staselogs solution does not prohibit P2P traffic it only makes it run on the background so that more bandwidth critical applications (VoIP, games, browsing etc.) are always usable and network delays stay constantly low for these applications.

As a last note I am also very sad to hear that universities (which should be the source of new innovations) are blocking P2P traffic. Universities should experiment freely and make new applications which use these kind of new technologies.