Measuring Accessibility of Popular Websites While Using the I2P Anonymity Network

Abstract

Anonymity networks, such as The Invisible Internet Project, commonly known as I2P, enable privacy aware users to stay anonymous on the Internet and provide secure methods of communication, as well as multi-layered encryption. Despite the many innocent reasons users opt for online anonymity, these particular networks are censored at times, as they are associated with criminal activity. The goal of this paper is to measure to what extent I2P network users are being blocked by popular websites, and not, however, by governments or internet service providers. To establish this, we developed a web crawler which compares the responses to HTTP(S) GET requests sent anonymously, via I2P, and non-anonymously. Our results are based on the analysis of the received HTTP status codes, and on screenshots of the requested websites, to assess content blocking. This experiment shows that I2P users suffer from some form of blocking in 10.09% of cases. However, it should be noted that I2P faces certain bandwidth limitations and traffic congestion at the outproxy. This is a result of the fact that I2P was not designed with the intent of being a proxy to the Internet, but rather a self sustaining peer-to-peer network.