Almost anonymous communication?
 

Limewire is one of my favourite open source projects, and I was just pondering today if there would be any way to anonymize it to a degree.
I'm no encryption expert by any means, so presumably nothing I say has any chance of working. But I thought it might be worth suggesting.

On to the basic idea, I realize that for an application like Limewire, who's purpose is publishing content, full time encryption would probably not be an option. So I was trying to think if there were any small pieces of communication that could be encrypted with good effect.
What I came up with is the idea of encrypting file requests and responses (if both hosts support it), but not the file transfer itself. As I understand it, Limewire can currently download a file in small chunks, and from many different hosts, so assuming the chunks were fairly small, they wouldn't be enough to provide information on the files being downloaded.

Mostly I was just rambling, and thought it might do some good here. So please let me know why this won't work.

i'll second that
 

i would like to see a feature to 'anonymize' my filesharing on the network.

Then Limewire's encryption would become proprioritory. Only Limewire would do that, and then Limewire would be shut off from the rest of the gnutella network, because they would be unable to decrypt it.

And if they were to give it to the other gnutella clients, that would be make it open source, which defeats the purpose of encryption.

I don't think that's true.
For example, isn't there a version of PGP that is open source, and it's entirely devoted to encryption.
As well, freenet is open source, and that's an encrypted p2p network.
As I understand it, all you would need is a unique private/public key pair for each session, one that could be randomly generated when limewire was started. Then when it connected to hosts, it would pass them the public key, and get their public key.
It could then encrypt messages for them, using their public key, and receive messages for it.

encryption is not the same as open-source. For instance, IPsec is an "open" standard (though I think someone owns the copyright). The key is that there is a standardized method for two computers to start-out with an unencrypted conversation and advance to a fully-encrypted conversation. It all relies on exchanging Public Keys -- a very cool technology!

Of course, encryption isn't really the issue here. Look at all the subpoenas the RIAA just server on Kazaa users...