Moonlight's Adaptive Fragment System (MAFS)

Formerly known as Moonlight Chunk System and Intelligent Corruption Handling (M-CS/ICH)

With the increasingly common micro-upload corruption attacks (malicious or otherwise), the legacy eD2k network's 9500KB chunk system is becoming increasingly more vulnerable to low-cost, low-bandwidth and minimal effort network disruption. As it is, it can take as little as a single bad bit in one 9500KB chunk to force a full-chunk re-download that could be no less corrupt than the originally downloaded chunk. Because of its extreme susceptibility to the simplest of attacks, even malicious dial-up clients could cause multi-gigabyte global network waste every hour. Unless cost-effective peppering corruption is stopped, it is not hard to imagine well-funded yet inexpensive distributed peppering farms causing sufficient bandwdith wastage to effectively kill the already-not-so-fast network.

Moonlight's Adaptive Fragment System (MAFS) is my pre-emptive cure to this upcoming plague. It will have scalable fragment sizes to suit users from dial-up to multi-megabit, corruption and file repair capabilities for re-sharing and fixing moderately corrupt files, strong internal integrity to make forseeable cryptanalysis attacks on regular hashes unworkable while providing a number of other collateral benefits:

Smaller verifiable fragments means faster spreading of fresh data
Smaller verifiable fragments means upload queues can be rotated faster
Since MAFS support will require protocol extensions and various other changes, it may also include >4GB files support. The MAFS core already supports these
For more details, visit the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) page.

In a world of absolute uncertainty, only the paranoid survive.

As P2P networks come under increasingly intense fire from special interests trying to disrupt them, P2Ps will need to evolve more reliable and efficient ways of countering those disruptions. MAFS is my attempt at providing the building blocks for such a stronger next-generation system that may be able to weather foreseeable attacks for the next many years, decades or possibly even centuries.

More details will be added to this page as the alpha and beta-testing periods approach - this is still at least 2-3 months off in the future at the moment.

In the meantime, you can go check out the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) and check out what documentation and tweaks I have here.

[2004-05-01] Given the rather massive amount of experience gained working on MoonlightTorrent (http://MoonlightTorrent.com), MAFS will most likely undergo a substantial rewrite once I get back to it. Also, because I am hardly using eMule anymore, it is highly likely that MAFS will debut as a part of MoonlightTorrent's side-protocol.