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WASTE is a peer-to-peer and friend-to-friend protocol and piece of software developed by Justin Frankel at Nullsoft in 2003. WASTE is an acronym for "We Await Silent Tristero's
Empire", a reference to Thomas Pynchon's novel The Crying of Lot 49 in which W.A.S.T.E. was a underground postal service. It was subsequently removed from distribution by AOL, Nullsoft's parent company, and is currently being developed as a SourceForge project.
WASTE behaves similarly to a virtual private network by connecting to a group of trusted computers, as determined by the users. It employs heavy encryption to ensure that third parties cannot decipher the messages being transferred. The same encryption is used to transmit and receive instant messages, chat, and files, maintain the connection, and browse and search. There is also an optional "Saturate" feature which adds random traffic, making traffic analysis more difficult. The nodes (each a trusted connection) automatically determine the lowest latency route for traffic and, in doing so, load balance. This also improves privacy, because packets often take different routes.
A "WASTE ring" can be formed by individuals sharing their RSA public keys and connecting to the ring (private and public keys are generated by WASTE from the random seeds of mouse movement). Once someone can see one person in the ring, that person can see everyone in the ring as long as the default setting for public keys to be shared among trusted hosts remains true.
The suggested size for a WASTE ring is 10-50 nodes.
WASTE requires port 1337 to be open (by default).
VIA released a fork of WASTE under the name PadlockSL, but removed the webpage for PadlockSL after a few weeks [1] (http://slashdot.org/articles/04/04/16/1215204.shtml). The GUI is written in QT and the Client is available for Linux and Windows.
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