A Bird's Eye View on the I2P Anonymous File-sharing Environment

International audienceAnonymous communications have been gaining more and more interest from Internet users as privacy and anonymity problems have emerged. Among anonymous enabled services, anonymous file-sharing is one of the most active one and is increasingly growing. Large scale monitoring on these systems allows us to grasp how they behave, which type of data is shared among users, the overall behaviour in the system. But does large scale monitoring jeopardize the system anonymity? In this work we present the first large scale monitoring architecture and experiments on the I2P network, a low-latency message-oriented anonymous network. We characterize the file-sharing environment within I2P, and evaluate if this monitoring affects the anonymity provided by the network. We show that most activities within the network are file-sharing oriented, along with anonymous web-hosting. We assess the wide geographical location of nodes and network popularity. We also demonstrate that group-based profiling is feasible on this particular network