The current state of anonymous file-sharing - Marc's Blog

4.3 eDonkey
The eDonkey Network came into existence with the "eDonkey2000" client by a com-
pany called Metamachine. After some time there were several open-source Clients that
had been created by reverse-engineering the network. Especially a client called "Emule"
gained popularity and soon was the major client in the network with a thriving developer
community creating modified versions of the main emule client that introduced lots of
new features.
The eDonkey network, unlike the Bittorrent network, is a "real" network. It is fully
searchable and information about files on the network can therefor be gathered without
the need of any metadata besides the files name.
4.3.1 Joining the network
To join the edonkey network, there are 2 basic possibilities:
1. Connecting using an eDonkey Server
2. Connecting using the Kademlia DHT
The concept of eDonkey Servers was the "original" way to connect to the network and
already implemented in the original eDonkey2000 client. There are a lot of public servers
available which are interconnected and able forward search requests and answers to one
another.
The Kademlia DHT was integrated in an application called ”Overnet” by the creators
of the original eDonkey2000 client and later on by EMule clients. It has to be noted
that although they both used the same DHT algorithm, these networks are incompatible
with one another.
On an interesting side note: As of 16 October 2007 the Overnet Protocol was still being
used by the Storm botnet for communication between infected machines. For more infor-
mation on the ”Storm Worm”, I recommend reading A Multi-perspective Analysis of the
Storm (Peacomm) Worm by Phillip Porras and Hassen Sa¨ıdi and Vinod Yegneswaran
of the Computer Science Laboratory [25].
4.3.2 File identification
Files inside the eDonkey network are identified by a so called "ed2k hash" and usually
are exchanged as a string looking like this:
15