Unveiling the I2P web structure: A connectivity analysis

Abstract

Web is a primary and essential service to share information among users and organizations at present all over the world. Despite the current significance of such a kind of traffic on the Internet, the so-called Surface Web traffic has been estimated in just about 5% of the total. The rest of the volume of this type of traffic corresponds to the portion of the Web known as Deep Web. These contents are not accessible by usual search engines because they are authentication protected contents or pages only reachable through technologies denoted as darknets. To browse through darknet websites, special authorization or specific software and configurations are needed. TOR is one of the most used darknet nowadays, but there are several other alternatives such as I2P or Freenet, which offer different features for end users. In this work, we perform a connectivity analysis of the websites in the I2P network (named eepsites) aimed to discover if different patterns and relationships from those used in legacy webs are followed in I2P, as well as to get insights about the dimension and structure of this darknet. For that, a novel tool is specifically developed by the authors and deployed on a distributed scenario. Main results conclude the decentralized nature of the I2P network, where there is a structural part of interconnected eepsites while other several nodes are isolated probably due to their intermittent presence in the network.