Privacy suggestion: I2P

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I2P

This is something to keep in mind I think, the application isn't finished yet, but I think it's time already to get the developer aware of it. There is a huge demand for secure bittorrent groups where you safely can share anything you'd like, without any third party tracing your ip number.

Hmm...looks interesting, however I'm not quite clear on how they plan to keep out RIAA/MPAA etc. bastards from poisoning the network...since according to the article everything is/should be anonymous, how do you identify which seed/peer sent you bad data? And how would you block that, if it's even possible at all? :/

I2P is not ment to keep the RIAA and MPAA out, it is about creating an anonymous network. Seed and Peers still need some sort of address, so they are identifiable, just not through an IP-address and IP-addresses are generally not anonymous).

Hmm, yes this poses alot of interesting questions, such as , how does one identify oneself to a tracker? And yes, how DOES one know a bad peer or how to indentify that peer?

This is only a suggestion of ONE encryption/obfuscation scheme which might work, I'm just throwing this general idea out there in the hopes that µTorrent will be the first "truly secure" bittorrent client, where everyone can exchange whatever content they want, without the fear of persecution.

yeah, I really like blocking a peer after he has given me 7 hashfails and cost me downloading 25mb of waste, and if this will hinder that, I disagree.

As someone who has recently found out about I2P, I just now decided to elaborate on this post a little. I wasn't sure if I should've written a new topic, since this is rather old and never really took off, but I decided to add my points as a followup here.

Klaus_1250 summed up the idea behind I2P in his post nicely. Instead of an ip address, each peer is identified by a key. The key uniquely represents one client, but that key can't be used to find out the ip address. This does not limit your possibility to block peers that send bad data, since you can just as well block the key instead of the ip.

There are already bittorrent clients (and trackers) ready for I2P: I2PSnark (port of Snark and included in the basic I2P package, I believe), a port of the original BT client (no link, sorry), I2P-Rufus (port of Rufus and a plugin for Azureus. Check out the forums on http://forum.i2p.net/viewforum.php?f=21 for more information.

Of course, for the torrents that use I2P, the tracker and peers would all also have to be using I2P, there's just no way to mix non-I2P peers and I2P ones. Most I2P-bt clients only handle I2P torrents. I don't see why you couldn't mix different kinds of torrents in the same program, though. You would have to run two different DHTs, but otherwise there'd be no problem.

Having µTorrent implement support for this would be very interesting. Right now, I doubt it would be widely used, and would probably take some work to implement (not THAT much, it's mostly an addressing thing that needs to be changed), so I could understand if it's not high up on the todo-list. Still, it's something worth thinking about.

IIRC, Azureus has I2P, Tor and regular IP support built-in to the client.

At least that's what I remember, and I didn't install any plugins for that purpose.

if I2P possible for utorrent...

but dont compromise performance :cool:

how sweet... no more RIAA/MPAA threat...

Please don't bump old threads, adding no useful information to them.

I2P or any other anonymizing network will compromise performance. I2P would be a nice thing, but the implementation is far from finished.

Haheh, I still can't believe that this thread is alive

The Tor and I2P folks have suggested that using these anonymizing networks for BitTorrent is a Bad Idea. The networks weren't really designed for such heavy-bandwidth uses and effectively lower the quality of service for others using the networks as a result.

http://www.chrisbrunner.com/?p=119

In lieu of using the anonymizing networks, everyone running uT should be running PeerGuardian.

http://phoenixlabs.org/pg2/

PG2 is useless as well.

Here's another idea to achive anonymity:

- Use UDP and fake the IP when uploading data. This way the downloader (leecher) will not know the IP of the uploader (seeder).

- When the downloader requests data it send those request to a third party (either someone that can be trusted or a randomly selected peer). This third party will forward the request to the uploaders. This way the uploader will not for sure know that the downloader has requested the data, i.e. no proof of who he is.

- The third party will however know the IP of both the uploader and the downloader but will have no proof that file sharing has taken place. Perhaps you can also do something smarter. If you don't have a trusted third party perhaps you can encrypt the data so that he doesn't know what is requested.

I still think that if you're concerned about privacy, you really shouldn't be using peer-to-peer networks at all.

Having followed all the threads I could find here about I2P, most seem to end with a dogmatic "NO" ( ! )

It seems like quite a few years have gone by since there was any real discussion about I2P i.e. its a few years now since the thread didn't abruptly end with a statement like - "this has been discussed many times before...decision was NO" ; I2P has moved forwards quite a long way since then. Many of the early problems have been dealt with (I2P does actually seem to work reliably now) and there are now vastly more people using I2P. An explanation would be more useful than a dogmatic no, or referring to threads several years old when I2P was at an earlier stage of development...

I would like to ask the forum if:

(1) Are there any IP anonymisation protocols being considered by µTorrent developers ?

(2) At what stage would µTorrent developers reconsider I2P ?

(Are there any specific technical issues with the current release of I2P that need to be addressed first? Is implementing I2P too difficult with uTorrent? Is there concern it would lead to legal threats? etc. etc. - Basically, what are the issues now as opposed to then...)

actually the makers of tor will advise that it is not recomended for use with i2p however the makers of i2p never sugessested not to use it for p2p it actually is recomended over tor for anopnymous on an over all record even though both networks run on the same basic structure to a certian extent i2p has far more anonymility that tor has ever had the tor network actually is very easy to acess the information and intercepot information out of for hackers due to the exact structure and hops of i2po it makes it a bit hjarder for hackers to trace back or implement the network but i2p can be used for p2p and so can tor but the tor network aint as strong and its not recomended to use tor for p2p downloads