20140715

I2P COMPARED TO TOR

Tor and Onion Routing are both anonymizing proxy networks, allowing people to tunnel out through their low latency mix network. The two primary differences between Tor / Onion-Routing and I2P are again related to differences in the threat model and the out-proxy design (though Tor supports hidden services as well). In addition, Tor takes the directory-based approach - providing a centralized point to manage the overall 'view' of the network, as well as gather and report statistics, as opposed to I2P's distributed network database and peer selection.

The I2P/Tor outproxy functionality does have a few substantial weaknesses against certain attackers - once the communication leaves the mixnet, global passive adversaries can more easily mount traffic analysis. In addition, the outproxies have access to the cleartext of the data transferred in both directions, and outproxies are prone to abuse, along with all of the other security issues we've come to know and love with normal Internet traffic.

However, many people don't need to worry about those situations, as they are outside their threat model. It is, also, outside I2P's (formal) functional scope (if people want to build outproxy functionality on top of an anonymous communication layer, they can). In fact, some I2P users currently take advantage of Tor to out proxy...

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