I2P

I2P is a free and open source project building an anonymous and/or pseudonymous virtual private network. The network is a simple layer that applications can use to anonymously and securely send messages to each other.

Note that it is likely that there are bugs in the software and there has been insufficient peer review to date. People should not use I2P prior to the 1.0 release without understanding the risks of their actions.

The network itself is strictly message based (a la IP), but there is a library available to allow reliable streaming communication on top of it (a la TCP). All communication is end to end encrypted (in total there are four layers of encryption used when sending a message), and even the end points ("destinations") are cryptographic identifiers (essentially a pair of public keys).

Although many of the developers had been a part of the IIP and Freenet communities, there are significant differences between their designs and concepts. IIP is an anonymous centralized IRC server, Freenet is a censorship resistant distributed data store, but I2P is an anonymous peer-to-peer distributed communication layer designed to run any traditional internet service (e.g. usenet, email, IRC, webhosting and http, telnet), as well as more traditional distributed applications (e.g. a distributed data store, a web proxy network using Squid cache, and DNS).

I2P is currently in the pre-alpha development stage and not yet ready for general anonymity use. The first stable release, version 1.0 is planned to arrive in August 2005.

The main developer of I2P is jrandom, with numerous support from others.

I2P software tools

Since I2P is an anonymous network layer, it is designed so other software programs can use it for anonymous communication, the so called application layer. As such there are a variety of tools currently available for I2P or in development.

I2P-BT

I2P-BT was a BitTorrent client for I2P that allowed anonymous swarming for file transfers. This client was a modified version of the original BitTorrent 3.4.2 program which ran on Windows and most Unices in a GUI and command-line environment.

I2P-BT was developed by the individual known as 'duck' on I2P in cooperation with smeghead. It is no longer being actively developed.

Reason for this is that the Azureus BitTorrent client took over with a new I2P plugin.

SAM

SAM [1] is a protocol that allows a client application written in any language to communicate over I2P.

Susimail

Azureus

Azureus is a BitTorrent client for I2P that allows anonymous swarming for file transfers.

See Also

• Anonymous P2P
• Freenet
• Onion Routing
• Crypto-anarchy
• Tor (Anonymous network) – A similar anonymous communication system that is designed as more of an outproxy network to the existing Internet.

External Links

• Official I2P website
• I2P Files and Source code
• I2P community