Summary
The Invisible Internet Project (I2P) is an anonymous network layer (implemented as a mix network) that allows for censorship-resistant, peer-to-peer communication. Anonymous connections are achieved by encrypting the user's traffic (by using end-to-end encryption), and sending it through a volunteer-run network of roughly 55,000 computers distributed around the world. Given the high number of possible paths the traffic can transit, a third party watching a full connection is unlikely. The software that implements this layer is called an "I2P router", and a computer running I2P is called an "I2P node". I2P is free and open sourced, and is published under multiple licenses. I2P has been beta software since it started in 2003 as a fork of Freenet. The software's developers emphasize that bugs are likely to occur in the beta version and that peer review has been insufficient to date. However, they believe the code is now reasonably stable and well-developed, and more exposure can help the development of I2P. The network is strictly message-based, like IP, but a library is available to allow reliable streaming communication on top of it (similar to TCP, although from version 0.6, a new UDP-based SSU transport is used). All communication is end-to-end encrypted (in total, four layers of encryption are used when sending a message) through garlic routing, and even the end points ("destinations") are cryptographic identifiers (essentially a pair of public keys), so that neither senders nor recipients of messages need to reveal their IP address to the other side or to third-party observers. Although many developers had been a part of the Invisible IRC Project (IIP) and Freenet communities, significant differences exist between their designs and concepts. IIP was an anonymous centralized IRC server. Freenet is a censorship-resistant distributed data store. I2P is an anonymous peer-to-peer distributed communication layer designed to run any traditional internet service (e.g.
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