Unveiling the I2P web structure: a connectivity analysis

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the connectivity and structure of the I2P darknet network, revealing its decentralized nature and the presence of interconnected and isolated nodes, using a novel distributed analysis tool.

Contribution

It introduces a new tool for analyzing I2P network connectivity and provides insights into its structural patterns and scale, which are less understood compared to the surface web.

Findings

I2P network is largely decentralized with interconnected eepsites.

Many nodes are isolated, likely due to intermittent presence.

The study offers new insights into I2P's structure and scale.

Abstract

Web is a primary and essential service to share information among users and organizations at present all over the world. Despite the current significance of such a kind of traffic on the Internet, the so-called Surface Web traffic has been estimated in just about 5% of the total. The rest of the volume of this type of traffic corresponds to the portion of Web known as Deep Web. These contents are not accessible by search engines because they are authentication protected contents or pages that are only reachable through the well known as darknets. To browse through darknets websites special authorization or specific software and configurations are needed. Despite TOR is the most used darknet nowadays, there are other alternatives such as I2P or Freenet, which offer different features for end users. In this work, we perform an analysis of the connectivity of websites in the I2P network (named eepsites) aimed to discover if different patterns and relationships from those used in legacy web are followed in I2P, and also to get insights about its dimension and structure. For that, a novel tool is specifically developed by the authors and deployed on a distributed scenario. Main results conclude the decentralized nature of the I2P network, where there is a structural part of interconnected eepsites while other several nodes are isolated probably due to their intermittent presence in the network.