A Bird's Eye View on the I2P Anonymous File-Sharing Environment

Anonymous communications have been gaining more and more interest from Internet users as privacy and anonymity problems have emerged. Among anonymous enabled services, anonymous filesharing is one of the most active one and is increasingly growing. Large scale monitoring on these systems allows us to grasp how they behave, which type of data is shared among users, the overall behaviour in the system. But does large scale monitoring jeopardize the system anonymity? In this work we present the first large scale monitoring architecture and experiments on the I2P network, a low-latency message-oriented anonymous network. We characterize the file-sharing environment within I2P, and evaluate if this monitoring affects the anonymity provided by the network. We show that most activities within the network are file-sharing oriented, along with anonymous web-hosting. We assess the wide geographical location of nodes and network popularity. We also demonstrate that group-based profiling is feasible on this particular network.

[1]  Mohamed Ali Kâafar,et al.  Digging into Anonymous Traffic: A Deep Analysis of the Tor Anonymizing Network , 2010, 2010 Fourth International Conference on Network and System Security.

[2]  Olivier Festor,et al.  When KAD Meets BitTorrent - Building a Stronger P2P Network , 2011, 2011 IEEE International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing Workshops and Phd Forum.

[3]  Michalis Faloutsos,et al.  The P2P War: Someone Is Monitoring Your Activities! , 2007, Networking.

[4]  Christian Grothoff,et al.  Privacy-Implications of Performance-Based Peer Selection by Onion-Routers: A Real-World Case Study Using I2P , 2011, PETS.

[5]  Dirk Grunwald,et al.  Shining Light in Dark Places: Understanding the Tor Network , 2008, Privacy Enhancing Technologies.

[6]  Roger Dingledine,et al.  A Case Study on Measuring Statistical Data in the Tor Anonymity Network , 2010, Financial Cryptography Workshops.

[7]  Walid Dabbous,et al.  One Bad Apple Spoils the Bunch: Exploiting P2P Applications to Trace and Profile Tor Users , 2011, LEET.

[8]  Paul F. Syverson,et al.  Hiding Routing Information , 1996, Information Hiding.

[9]  Pablo Rodriguez,et al.  Monitoring the Bittorrent Monitors: A Bird's Eye View , 2009, PAM.

[10]  David Mazières,et al.  Kademlia: A Peer-to-Peer Information System Based on the XOR Metric , 2002, IPTPS.

[11]  Olivier Festor,et al.  I2P's Usage Characterization , 2012, TMA.

[12]  Peter Druschel,et al.  Peer-to-peer systems , 2010, Commun. ACM.

[13]  Taoufik En-Najjary,et al.  A global view of kad , 2007, IMC '07.