I2P - Definition and Overview

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

The first stable release, version 1.0 is planned to arrive in May 2005.

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 (http://www.i2p.net/)
• I2P Files and Source code (http://dev.i2p.net/i2p/)
• I2P community (http://forum.i2p.net/)