In this blog post, we summarize the outcomes of our project entitled “An Empirical Study of the I2P Anonymity Network and its Censorship Resistance” supported by the Open Technology Fund - Information Controls Fellowship Program.
0. Introduction The Invisible Internet Project (I2P) is one of the most well-known and widely used anonymity networks. I2P can be used by privacy-conscious Internet users to protect their online privacy, or by censored users to bypass censorship conducted by local Internet regimes.
From early March until April, 2019, we conducted measurements from 1.7K network locations located in 164 countries to examine the accessibility of four different I2P services: the official homepage, its mirror site, reseed servers, and active relays in the network. We could identify blocking attempts in five countries. China consistently hinders access to I2P by poisoning DNS resolutions of the I2P homepage and reseed servers; SNI-based blocking was detected in Oman and Qatar when accessing the I2P homepage over HTTPS; TCP packet injection was detected in Iran, Oman, Qatar, and Kuwait when visiting the mirror site via HTTP; and explicit block pages were discovered when visiting the mirror site from Oman, Qatar, and Kuwait.
Based on the original definition from I2P homapage, a reseed server consists of a Java I2P router, an HTTPS web server, and some scripts that periodically gather router infos from the router, bundle and sign them into a custom file format, and deliver these files over HTTPS.
This tutorial will walk you through the process of setting up a reseed server and routing its traffic over Cloudflare. You may ask: “But why Cloudflare?