I2P

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 numberous 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.

Feedspace

Feedspace, a distributed, push-based content distribution framework for the I2P network. What Feedspace will resemble is a newsgroup board like Usenet where people can post to 'boards' which are accessible to the public. A close analogy is the program Frost for Freenet.

Frosk is currently a developer of Feedspace.

• More information at feedspace.i2p if you are running i2p

  Fire2pe

  I2P-BT

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.

QuarterMaster

QuarterMaster, or Q, is a distributed content store like Freenet. The advantages to such a system is that someone can insert their webpage, or other content, without the need to host it directly. This saves on bandwidth to the host, and potentially makes the content more available for the audience. As well, it more secure from an anonymity stand point since inserted content can then be wiped from the hard drive, while direct hosting necessarily means the content is stored on the computer.

The current developer of QuarterMaster is Aum, who also created the tool Freemail among others. Quartermaster is written in Python

Sam

Susimail

Azureus

Azureus is a BitTorrent client for I2P that allowes 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