eMule Version 0.49b Released

The eMule development team only needed two months and a half to come up with this new version of the popular p2p client. The site reads:

Barely two and a half months have passed," writes the eMule development team, "and yet another new eMule version is on the horizon. 0.49b continues to complete the agenda of its predecessor in the 0.49 series. This means further optimizations for Kad and more important immunity against recently researched routing attacks, several improvements of the GUI for Vista users, a new UPnP implementation, easier connecting to Kad for new users and fixing of an important bug which slipped into the last version.

The updates solve many security issues and bugs, but on the whole the version keeps the main improvements from the previous version. There’s also changelog available. Below you can read some of the points of interest:

• Added a new search method option "Automatic" which lets eMule choose which search method to use. eMule will select either Servers (Local) or Kad, based on which network we are connected to and some other indicators if connected to both networks.

• Implemented a special nodes.dat version, which is more suited for mass distribution without causing significant additional traffic for the included nodes. This hopefully allows us to add a nodes.dat to the installer, so that new user can connect to Kad without having to connect to servers or downloading a nodes.dat themself

• Implemented an alternate method to estimate the total user count in the Kad network, which is not based on our local routing table. Its experimental and only shown in the network dialog (double click the world icon in the status bar)

• Several changes were made to Kad in order to defy routing attacks researched by University of Minnesota guys [Peng Wang, James Tyra, Eric Chan-Tin, Tyson Malchow, Denis Foo Kune, Nicholas Hopper, Yongdae Kim], in particular:

• Kad contacts will only be able to update themself in others routing tables if they provide the proper key (supported by 0.49a+ nodes) in order to make it impossible to hijack them

• Kad uses now a three-way-handshake (or for older version a similar check) for new contacts, making sure they do not use a spoofed IP

• Unverified contacts are not used for routing tasks and a marked with a special icon in the GUI

• Fixed: Memory leak in context menus.

In brief, Kad works like this – users connect to an IP address on a network and when someone connects to that IP address, other users are able to connect to the network by connecting to the users IP address. Regularly, the easiest method to connect to Kad is by simply connecting to an ED2K server which will most of the times have a large number of users also connecting to the Kad network – facilitating, this way, a connection to the Kad network.

However, if a user doesn’t connect to a server he or she can download a nodes.dat file which includes a number of IP addresses. Using that nodes.dat file nodes.dat file, will have you hoping that one of those IP addresses, at least, is connected to the network in order to enable a connection to the network. After that, eMule has the ability to remember some IP addresses – in case the app is shut down for a period of time, it just searches those addresses when you start it up again at a later time.

As presented, this latest development deals with this problem and helps users simply connect to the Kad network without being required to download a nodes.dat file or connect to an existing ED2K server.

Well, congrats eMule and keep the good work!

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