What is Anoncoin?Anoncoin is a coin with active development support which focus on Anonymity. It was forked out of Litecoin, but have since catched up with the Bitcoin 0.8.5.3 source, and taken it's own way.
Features (Some will not take effect before protocol switch #3):- 3 minute block targets
- 5 coins, then subsidy halves in 306600 blocks (~2 years)
- A limit on 4,2 Million coins
- Native I2P support (Anonymous darknet)
The I2P Network?I2P is a scalable, self organizing, resilient packet switched anonymous network layer, upon which any number of different anonymity or security conscious applications can operate.
I2P is an open source project developed in early 2003 by a group of full time developers with a group of part time contributors from all over the world.
It is fundamental to understand that inside an I2P network the "hidden" component is represented by an application in execution on the node doing, and of course the path followed by the information to reach the destination. Another important concept for I2P is the "tunnel", a directed path which extends through an explicitly selected list of routers. The first router that belongs to a tunnel is named "gateway".
The communication within a tunnel in unidirectional, this means that it is impossible to send back data without using another separated tunnel.
Also for I2P a layered encryption model is implemented, known as "garlic routing" and "garlic encryption", the information transits on network routers that are able to decrypt only the respective layer.
I2P Routing?When Alice wants to send a message to Bob, she does a lookup in the netDb to find Bob's leaseSet, giving her his current inbound tunnel gateways.
Alice's router aggregates multiple messages into a single "garlic message", encrypting it using a particular public key, in this way only the public key owner can open the message.
For typical end to end communication between Alice and Bob, the garlic will be encrypted using the public key published in Bob's leaseSet, allowing the message to be encrypted without giving out the public key to Bob's router.
She selects one of her outbound tunnels and sends the data include of necessary instructions message and with instructions for the outbound tunnel's endpoint to forward the message on to one of Bob's inbound tunnel gateways. When the outbound tunnel endpoint receives those instructions, it forwards the message according the instructions provided, and when Bob's inbound tunnel gateway receives it, it is forwarded down the tunnel to Bob's router.
Be aware, we have said that transmission is unidirectional, this means that if Alice wants Bob to be able to reply to the message, she needs to transmit her own destination explicitly as part of the message itself.
I2P is end-to-end encryption. No information is sent in clear or decrypted during its path including the sender and recipient. To each node is assigned an internal network address different from the network IP address that isn't used.
Layered EncryptionThe term layered encryption refers to the encryption process used during the transfer from a source to the destination through a series of peers that composes the tunnel.
Both Tor and I2P use layered cryptography. Intermediate entities have only to know how to forward the connection on to the next hop in the chain but cannot decipher the contents of the connections.
I2P is end to end encryption. No information is sent in clear or decrypted along its path, including the sender and recipient. To each node is assigned an internal network address different from the network IP address that isn't used.
I2P uses cryptographic ID to identify both routers and end point services, for naming identifiers is used the "Base 32 Names" techniques that attributes a SHA256 digest to the base64 representation of the destination. The hash is base 32 encoded and ".b32.i2p" is concatenated onto the end of the hash.
Garlic RoutingGarlic Routing is very similar to onion routing with several differences. Let's consider first of all that in garlic routing, it is possible to aggregate multiple messages. Another difference from Tor is that the tunnels are unidirectional.
Garlic routing in I2P is adopted mainly in three distinguished phases:
1. For building and routing through tunnels (layered encryption). In I2P communication tunnels are unidirectional; this means that each interlocutor has to create a couple of tunnels, one for outbound and one for inbound traffic. There is also the possibility of a reply from the recipient, therefore another couple of tunnels must be created for a total of four tunnels.
2. For bundling, determining the success or failure of end to end message delivery.
3. For publishing some network database entries.
The Tor network?The Deep Web is the set of information resources on the World Wide Web, not reported by normal search engines. It is a network of interconnected systems not indexed having a size hundreds of times higher than the current visible web.
A parallel web that has a much wider number of information represents an invaluable resource for private companies, governments, and especially cybercrime. In the imagination of many persons, the Deep Web term is associated with the concept of anonymity that goes with criminal intents that cannot be pursued because they are submerged in an inaccessible world. It’s fundamental to remark that this interpretation of the Deep Web is deeply wrong.
Tor is the acronym of “The Onion Router”, a system implemented to enable online anonymity thanks to the routing of Internet traffic through a worldwide volunteer network of servers hiding user’s information.
As usually happens, the project was born in the military sector, sponsored the US Naval Research Laboratory, and from 2004 to 2005 it was supported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Access to the network is possible using a Tor client, a software that allows user to reach network resources otherwise inaccessible. Today the software is under development and maintenance of Tor Project. Using a Tor Network a user could avoid his tracing, his privacy is guaranteed by the unpredictable route of the information inside the net and due to the large adoption of encrypting mechanisms.
Connecting to the Tor networkImagine a typical scenario where Alice desire to be connected with Bob using the Tor network. Let’s see step by step how it is possible.
She makes an unencrypted connection to a centralized directory server containing the addresses of the Tor nodes. After receiving the address list from the directory server the Tor client software will connect to a random node (the entry node) through an encrypted connection. The entry node would make an encrypted connection to a random second node which would in turn do the same to connect to a random third Tor node. The process goes on until it involves a node (exit node) connected to the destination.
Consider that during Tor routing, in each connection, the Tor nodes are randomly chosen and the same node cannot be used twice in the same path.
To ensure anonymity the connections have a fixed duration. Every ten minutes, to avoid statistical analysis that could compromise the user’s privacy, the client software changes the entry node.
Up to now we have considered an ideal situation in which a user accesses the network only to connect to another. To further complicate the discussion, in a real scenario, the node Alice used could in turn be used as a node for routing purposes with other established connections between other users.
A malevolent third party would not be able to know which connection is initiated as a user and which as a node, making the monitoring of the communications impossible.
The Tor client distributed from the official web site of the project could be executed on all the existing platforms and many add-ons are freely available that allow the integration of navigation software in existing web browsers. Despite that the network has been projected to protect user's privacy, to be really anonymous it's suggested to go though a VPN.
A better mode to navigate inside the Deep Web is to use the Tails OS distribution which is bootable from any machine without leaving a trace on the host. Once the Tor Bundle is installed, it comes with its own portable Firefox version, ideal for anonymous navigation due to an appropriate control of installed plugins.
The user must be aware of the presence of many plugins in his browsers that expose his privacy to serious risks. Many of these plugins could be used to reveal a user's information during the navigation.
As said, the resources inside the Tor network are not indexed and is very hard to find them if we are accustomed to classic search engines. The way to search the information is profoundly different due to the absence of indexing of the content. A practical suggestion to new users is to refer to Wikis and BBS-like sites that aggregate links, categorizing them in more suitable groups of consulting. Another difference that the user has to take in mind is that instead of classic extensions (e.g. .com, .gov), the domains in the Deep Web generally end with the .onion suffix.
Be careful, some contents are labeled with commonly used tags such as CP= child porn. PD is pedophile, stay far from them.
The Deep Web is considered the place where everything is possible, you can find every kind of material and services for sale, most of them illegal. The hidden web offers to cybercrime great business opportunity, hacking services, malware, stolen credit cards, and weapons.
We all know the potentiality of the e-commerce in the ordinary web and its impressive growth in last couple of years, well now imagine the Deep Web market that is more than 500 times bigger and where there is no legal limits on the goods to sell. We are faced with amazing businesses controlled by cyber criminal organizations.
Conclusion from the first ref.The article has the main purpose to introduce basics of the two most diffused softwares to anonymize a user's experiences on the web, Tor and I2P. Their importance is very high; thanks to these networks it is possible to avoid censorship and monitoring. At the moment I have a meaningful experience with Tor networks, its community as said provides a great support for those users that desire or need to be anonymous on Internet.
I believe that despite the fact that I2P has existed about a decade, it is very under-utilized, the presence of a limited community represents in my opinion a brake on its growth.
I have used both and I found both efficiency effective. I tried also to sniff a package using specific software with the intent to disclose navigation data or any reference to the user's identity, of course without success.
The success of anonymizing a network is related to their diffusion, and without doubt Tor is a step forward, and the more users have access to sharing resources, the faster will be the navigation.
Refs.http://resources.infosecinstitute.com/anonymizing-networks-tor-vs-i2p/ - Thansk for this descriptions!
http://www.i2p2.de/index.htmlhttps://www.torproject.org/http://www.i2p2.de/_static/pdf/i2p_philosophy.pdfhttp://dougvitale.wordpress.com/2012/05/29/tor-anonymity-how-it-works-and-how-to-use-it/http://www.i2p2.de/how_intro
