I2P
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i2p is a self-organizing distributed routing layer. It is organic in such a way that it commoditises and anonymises connectivity, storage, and transport.
- dot-p2p.org - A good starting reference for what, why, and how
- I2P DNS Web of Trust
- i2p2.de Technical Introduction - Apparently, the I2P official site
- I2P plugin for Vuze (Azureus) Bittorent client
- Apparently also supports Gnutella and Bittorent
- Twitter messaging over I2P
Installing on Debian/Ubuntu
There are packages available for Debian and Ubuntu in their site here. I decided to download the source and which also required me to install the java-6-openjdk and ant packages before running ant pkg in the unzipped source directory. This ran through the compilation process which took a couple of minutes, and then I downloaded and ran the graphical installer with java -jar i2pinstall_0.9.jar. After installation a browser window opens with a great deal of information about the running service with many statistics and configuration options.
To be able to visit .i2p "eepsites", the browser proxy needs to be configured to use port 4444 (4445 for HTTPS).
Addressing
All destinations in I2P are 516-byte (or longer) keys. (To be more precise, it is a 256-byte public key plus a 128-byte signing key plus a null certificate, which in Base64 representation is 516 bytes. Certificates are not used now, if they are, the keys will be longer. One possible use of certificates is for proof of work.)
If an application (i2ptunnel or the HTTP proxy) wishes to access a destination by name, the router does a very simple local lookup to resolve that name. The client application (technically, the client side of I2CP in the I2P API) does a linear search through three local files, in order, to look up host names and convert them to a 516-byte destination key:
- privatehosts.txt
- userhosts.txt
- hosts.txt
The lookup is case-insensitive. The first match is used, and conflicts are not detected. There is no enforcement of naming rules in lookups.
There is an application bundled with the install called addressbook which periodically retrieves other users' hosts.txt files and merges them with the local hosts.txt, after several checks. Naming conflicts are resolved on a first-come first-served basis. Another bundled application called SusiDNS is a web interface for configuring addressbook subscriptions and accessing the four files.
Entries can be imported with a direct URL to the local SusiDNS interface. The address in in the format of http://127.0.0.1:7657/susidns/addressbook.jsp?book=private&hostname=NAME&destination=DEST where NAME is the .i2p hostname and DEST is the 516 character network destination.
