The following networks are discussed on this page.

• RetroShare
• Morphmix / Tarzan
• Mixminion / Mixmaster
• JAP
• MUTE / AntsP2P
• Haystack

Most of the following sections are fairly old, and may not be accurate. For an overview of available comparisons, see the main network comparisons page. You may contribute an analysis by entering a new issue on Github.

RetroShare

RetroShare is a set of peer-to-peer applications running in a Friend-to-friend (F2F) network. Each peer of such F2F network makes direct IP connections only to authenticated peers ("friends") after explicit certificates exchange. It can discover unauthenticated peers (e.g. friends of friends), but connections to them are relayed over "friend" peers for providing privacy and anonymity.

RetroShare is designed to build a private network of trusted peers, while I2P is designed to be a large-scaled public anonymous network. Recent versions of RetroShare have options to run as a public "darknet" by using I2P or Tor as a transport. That way all connections are anonymized and no trust is required for adding new "friends".

Morphmix / Tarzan

Morphmix and Tarzan are both fully distributed, peer to peer networks of anonymizing proxies, allowing people to tunnel out through the low latency mix network. Morphmix includes some very interesting collusion detection algorithms and Sybil defenses, while Tarzan makes use of the scarcity of IP addresses to accomplish the same. The two primary differences between these systems and I2P are related to I2P's threat model and their out-proxy design (as opposed to providing both sender and receiver anonymity). There is source code available to both systems, but we are not aware of their use outside of academic environments.

Mixminion / Mixmaster

Mixminion and Mixmaster are networks to support anonymous email against a very powerful adversary. High-latency messaging applications running on top of I2P (for example Syndie or I2PBote) may perhaps prove adequate to meet the threat model of those adversaries, while running in parallel along side the needs of low latency users, to provide a significantly larger anonymity set. High-latency support within the I2P router itself may or may not be added in a distant future release. It is too early to say if I2P will meet the needs of users requiring extreme protection for email.

As with Tor and Onion Routing, both Mixminion and Mixmaster take the directory based approach as well.

JAP

JAP (Java Anonymous Proxy) is a network of mix cascades for anonymizing web requests, and as such it has a few centralized nodes (participants in the cascade) that blend and mix requests from clients through the sequence of nodes (the cascade) before proxying out onto the web. The scope, threat model, and security is substantially different from I2P, but for those who don't require significant anonymity but still are not satisfied with an Anonymizer-like service, JAP is worth reviewing. One caution to note is that anyone under the jurisdiction of the German courts may want to take care, as the German Federal Bureau of Criminal Investigation (FBCI) has successfully mounted an attack on the network. Even though the method of this attack was later found to be illegal in the German courts, the fact that the data was successfully collected is the concern. Courts change their minds based upon circumstance, and this is evidence that if a government body or intelligence agency wanted to, they could gather the data, even if it may be found inadmissible in some courts later)

MUTE / AntsP2P

Both of these systems work through the same basic antnet routing, providing some degree of anonymity based on the threat model of providing plausible deniability against a simple non-colluding adversary. With the antnet routing, they first either do a random walk or a broadcast search to find some peer with the data or identity desired, and then use a feedback algorithm to optimize that found path. This works well for applications that merely want to know what other people around them have to offer - "How are y'all doing" vs. "Hey Alice, how are you" - you basically get a local cluster of nodes that can share files with and maintain some degree of anonymity (though you don't have much control over who is in that group of peers).

However, the algorithm does not scale well at all - if the application wants to speak with a particular peer it ends up doing a broadcast search or random walk (though if they are lucky enough for that to succeed, the antnet routing should optimize that found connection). This means that while these networks can work great at small scales, they are not suitable for large networks where someone wants to get in touch with another specific peer. That does not mean that there is no value in these systems, just that their applicability is limited to situations where their particular issues can be addressed.

Haystack

This was a closed-source network targeted at Iranian users. Tor did a good writeup on what to look for in a circumvention tool. Suffice it to say that being closed source and publicly targeting a specific country are not good ideas. I2P is, of course, open source. However, that source, and our technical documentation, need much more review.

Paid VPN Services

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Others

You may contribute an analysis by entering a new issue on Github.