Group-Based Characterization for the I2P Anonymous File-Sharing Environment

The I2P network provides an abstraction layer allowing two parties to communicate in an anonymous manner. This network is optimised for anonymous web hosting and anonymous file-sharing. I2P´s file- sharing community is highly active where users deploy their file-sharing applications on top of the network. I2P uses a variation of Onion routing, thus assuring the unlinkability between a user and its file-sharing application. In this paper, we take the first step towards the linkability of users and applications in the I2P network. We conduct a group-based characterisation, where we determine to what extent a group of users is responsible for the overall I2P´s file-sharing activity. We used Pearson´s coefficient to correlate users from two cities and the most used anonymous file-sharing application. We determine that two cities explain more than a third of all file-sharing activity within the I2P network.