I2P Anonymous Network
Description
I2P is an internet within the internet, also called a "darknet". I2P aims to make it very difficult to know who is providing and/or accessing content. With the internet this is relatively easy using IP addresses and corporation of providers. I2P hides your IP address by encrypting requests and responses while routing these over multiple nodes of the I2P network. Each node-to-node connection is a tunnel. Tunnels expire and are replaced every 10 minutes. Each participant can share a bit of bandwidth to route encrypted data for others.
With the current network you are doing well if you have 50-100Kbps. Yes this is very slow but that is the price you pay for anonymity.
More information:
Install from I2P Repository
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:i2p-maintainers/i2p sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install i2p
Start router service
i2prouter start
Configure
- Note that the port that is configured is randomly picked. You can find your port number on the config page: http://127.0.0.1:7657/confignet
- Adjust your NAT/firewall to forward the port for TCP and UDP. You can also use the UPnP feature if that is available in your NAT/firewall
- Increase the bandwidth settings, these are quite low by default. Example:
- 600 KBps down
- 400 KBps up
- 20% shared
Firefox browsing I2P websites
- I2P website, known as "eepSites", are only accessible via the I2P network
- eepSites have the .i2p suffix.
- We will need the Application Tunnel "I2P HTTP Proxy" (running by default)
- We can configure Firefox to use the local proxy for these sites with a PAC file
I use the following PAC file on my local computer to configure the proxy:
sudo gedit /opt/i2p-proxy-pac
//PAC-file
function FindProxyForURL(url, host) {
//if .ip2 then try PROXY, fail-over DIRECT
if (shExpMatch(host, "*.i2p")) {
return "PROXY 127.0.0.1:4444; DIRECT";
}
return "DIRECT";
}
In Firefox configure the use of the PAC file:
- Go to Firefox > Preferences > Advanced > Network > Connection Settings
- Check the 'Automatic proxy configuration URL':
- Enter: 'file:///opt/i2p-proxy-pac'
More info on PAC files:
Build-in BitTorrent client
The I2P installation contains a BitTorrent client:
Do not expect high speeds though. You can lower the number of hops for better performance, it will be less secure though. A high number of tunnels does not seem to influence the speed by much and is not advised. Activity on the I2P network (such as visiting eepSites) may improve the results as the number of known nodes increase. The same goes for a longer up-time of your router.
Example configuration:
- 2 hops
- 4 tunnels
- upload bandwidth limit: 200 KBps (half of available 400)
