International Research Journal of Engineering and Technology (IRJET)
e-ISSN: 2395-0056
Volume: 04 Issue: 07 | July -2017
p-ISSN: 2395-0072
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Comparison of Anonymous Communication Networks-Tor, I2P, Freenet Neelam Negi MCA Department, Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute, Matunga, Mumbai ---------------------------------------------------------------------***---------------------------------------------------------------------
Abstract - In the past few years, revelations made my some
overly network that provided platform for censorshipresistant communication and publishing.
secret organizations around the world has given rise to an interest in anonymous communication in order to protect the identity of the users and encourage freedom of speech. In order to provide such online anonymity, several software and platforms have emerged in the recent years. These software/platforms enable their users to protect their identity. In this paper, I shall give a brief overview of three well known anonymous networks – Tor, I2P and Freenet, mention their strengths and weaknesses and finally provide a comparison of the three networks.
2.1 THE ONION ROUTER (TOR) The Tor network is a platform for enabling anonymous communication. The basic idea on which Tor operates is routing the traffic across an overlay network of routers that operate globally, and are volunteer operated and managed. This routing involves more than over seven thousand relays primarily focused at concealing the user’s identity, location and usage pattern. This makes the user less vulnerable to any one observing the network or performing traffic analysis.
Key Words: Anonymity, Freenet, I2P, Tor, freesites, Darknet
The tremendous advancements in technology in past few decades has given rise to the concern of communication privacy. Reasons for protecting the identity while communicating may differ from one user to other. An individual may want to remain anonymous while performing confidential activities or business transactions. Privacy is of highest value to certain individuals who do not wish to make their activities known to others.
A major issue with the public internet is that anyone observing the network can analyze the network and know a great deal of information about the user’s activity on the internet, data being transferred, sites visited, etc. Even if the data is encrypted, a lot can be determined from analyzing the network traffic itself. Tor aims to eliminate this problem by directing this network traffic through a network of routers so that your transactions are distributed across various sources in the network and the communication can’t be traced back to any single point in the network.
Although encryption mechanisms are one way to secure communication, there might still be certain aspects of communication that are at a risk of exposure such as IP addresses of communication parties. Exposure of IP addresses of individuals may result in severe consequences. An intruder can easily overhear and analyse the communication packets passed and use techniques such as traffic analysis to uncover a number of aspects of the ongoing communication, thereby proving to be a potential threat to an individual’s privacy.
The group of connected routers form a circuit of encrypted connections through relays on the Tor network. No individual resource on this relay path knows the complete path around the circuit or the identity and location of other participants in the circuit. The sender / receiver is allowed only a single hop around this circuit, as a result of which no eavesdropper can use traffic analysis or any other method to track any of the participating resource. Ideally, one such circuit is kept alive for a duration of ten minutes after which the upcoming requests are provided a new circuit.
In order to overcome all these issues, several techniques/software have been developed, that provide anonymous and safe communication over the internet. The Onion Router (Tor) Project is one such solution to the growing needs of anonymity in communications. Tor was one of the first known solutions to this problem. Overtime, Tor came up some limitations as it was based on a centralized system. To overcome its challenges, one more project emerged known as the Invisible Internet Project (I2P) with an aim of providing even better security and anonymity. One more system called Freenet emerged with the aim of providing distributed, Internet-wide, peer-to-peer
2.2 THE INVISIBLE INTERNET PROJECT
1. INTRODUCTION
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I2P is also an anonymous communication and overlay network that enables its users to send and receive messages anonymously. I2P is very similar to Tor in terms of features such as providing anonymous access to online content, peerto-peer routing and multi layered end-to-end data encryption. However, the primary focus of I2P is to create a network within the internet.I2P communication mechanism heavily relies on packet-based routing. Every user in the relay network has two associated “tunnels”- inbound and outbound. A “tunnel” is a sequence of peers that route messages in one direction. A user intending to send a
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