Towards Measurement on the I2P Network

The I2P network has been widely used to protect user privacy via an open network of onion routers run by volunteers. To the best of our knowledge, the behavior of peers in the I2P network has not been well investigated in the existing researches. In this paper, we first present a simple and effective way to collect peers in the I2P network. Each day over 82% peers has been collected compared to the statistics from the statistics web site. With the data collected, we perform an empirical evaluation, revealing the phenomenon about IP address aliasing and identity aliasing. As identity aliasing makes bad impact on the availability and anonymity of the I2P network, we introduce family concept into the I2P network to mitigate the impact.