I2p, but do you? Enough with the potty talk and onto the discussion of private parts, or, uhh, privacy… online. This post is going to cover a technology relatively new to me, but that has existed in some form or another since 2003 called The Invisible Internet Project, or I2p.
In recent months a similar anonymous communication solution, TOR has been victimized to such an extent that it would become unusable by those individuals whom stand in opposition to censorship and that possibly partake in unsavory online activities. A man’s gotta have his Darknet Adderall and who is to say that he can or can’t purchase such things (other than the DEA)? Another three lettered acronym, DoS or Denial of Service is a type of cyber attack that renders certain online services unusable and a very sophisticated form of this would strike the TOR network in Sep 22′ ensuring that no such person had access to any marketplace where such illicit substances could be purchased. Coincidence? Probably, but you never know with those three lettered agencies. As minutes turned to more minutes, those desperate individuals in need of… whatever it is they needed would google away alternatives to TOR and their solution would come in the form of the I2p network.
The I2p network originated as a fork of a similar peer-to-peer network called Freenet in 2003. I2p manages to hide a user’s identity by acting as an anonymous network layer in respect to the OSI model of how the internet is structured/works. It routes a users activity through “peers” which then reroute said activity to other peers before it reaches a final destination. These peers, or routers are similar to proxy servers/nodes that any user of the I2p network contributes to the existence of via a browser-based I2P router console that is included with the overall software package.
It remains to be seen whether I2p will or can completely fill the void left when TOR becomes virtually unusable due to the previously mentioned and future DoS attacks. Intrinsically, I2p’s hard requirement of forcing users to contribute some amount of bandwidth in order to use the service can and will prevail in comparison to TOR’s optional and bandwidth handicapping stance on the matter. Like everything else on the internet, I2P’s decentralized nature makes it a hot topic and potential/surefire replacement for it’s centralized equivalent in TOR, however, there already exist theoretical variations of DoS and other such attacks that could hinder I2p and other peer-to-peer services in a similarly crippling fashion. Such cyber-crime could be the topic of a future blog, but if that never manifests, this paper covers the topic in detail.
UNTIL NEXT TIME…
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