A 50-router I2P deployment spanning five geographic locations stabilizes in approximately 25 minutes and consumes roughly 21 GB RAM (417 MB per router, measured via live systemd cgroups), with a single-host ceiling of approximately 90 routers and a static-profiling estimate (257 MB) that was 62% lower than the live measurement.

Advertising a 16 MB/s bandwidth class did not raise attackers' measured peak throughput above controls under light testbed load (0.127 ± 0.000 KBps vs 0.210 ± 0.072 KBps, ρ = 0.60), showing that the behavioral lever (earned performance) is ineffective at low traffic volumes and that direct bonus injection is the operative attack component in I2P reputation manipulation.

§5.3, Fig. 11, Fig. 12 evaluation

The paper identifies a statistical anomaly defense against I2P reputation injection: an injected bonus value (e.g., 9999) sits orders of magnitude above any legitimate measured value for the same peer, so a router comparing stored bonus fields against the distribution of its own observed measurements for that peer could flag and discard outlier values while leaving legitimately earned reputations intact.

§8 defense

Across five independent trials, injecting speedBonus and capacityBonus values of 9999 into I2P peer profiles deterministically promoted adversary nodes into the victim's eligible selection set (Fv) with perfect consistency (σ = 0), and the adversary was chosen for 1.38× more tunnel build requests than matched controls (10.76 ± 0.20 vs 7.80 ± 1.84 lifetime agreed-to tunnels).

§5.3, Table 3 evaluation

Selection stage success does not imply delivery stage success: adversary nodes selected 1.38× more often were also rejected 3.45× more often than controls (265.8 ± 21.2 vs 77.0 ± 16.5 lifetime rejections), demonstrating that compromising the selection criterion is a necessary but not sufficient condition for traffic interception.

§5.3, Fig. 10, Fig. 12 evaluation

The paper demonstrates that two protocol-specific censorship changes — QUIC blocking reaching 100% and DNS-over-TCP blocking reaching 96.68% — both occurred in the scan conducted immediately before Iran's June 18 full blackout, and that similar shutdown preparations were also documented before Iran's January 2026 shutdown. The authors hypothesize that continuous long-term measurement of protocol-specific censorship rates could provide advance warning of impending shutdowns before they come into full effect.

2026-anon-insights-into-iranian §3, §4 http3-quic-blockdns-poisoningmeasurement-platform

A code-level audit of 737 Chrome VPN and proxy browser extensions found that 520 of 522 sampled packages routed all non-loopback browsing traffic to a single shared SOCKS5 infrastructure; 274 of the 737 impersonated 66 known VPN or privacy brands across at least 40 developer accounts, and 516 of the identified extensions remained live in the Chrome Web Store at the time of data collection.

2026-anon-vpn-ai-deepseek §免费VPN扩展的核心问题 measurement-platform

Chrome Web Store metrics—including cumulative installation display counts totaling 75,486, five-star ratings, and brand-similar icons—provided no reliable signal of proxy operator trustworthiness among the 737 identified malicious VPN extensions; 516 remained listed throughout the study period despite routing traffic to a shared centralized infrastructure.

2026-anon-vpn-ai-deepseek §免费VPN扩展的核心问题 measurement-platform

Comparative analysis of 73 unmatched events (2022 onward) between IODA's automated network-level detection and Access Now's #KeepItOn Shutdown Tracker reveals systematic documentation gaps — shutdowns recorded by human reporters are frequently absent from automated measurement platforms and vice versa.

2026-cheek-gaps-record-observability Abstract / §1 Introduction measurement-platformbgp-hijackactive-probing

Application-layer blocking — where censors restrict specific applications or services without disrupting IP connectivity — is invisible to network-level measurement systems like IODA that monitor BGP, active probing, darknet telescope, and Google Search traffic, making it a growing blind spot in automated shutdown detection.

2026-cheek-gaps-record-observability Abstract / §3 Detection Gap Categories measurement-platformdpi

AS-targeted shutdowns — where censors restrict connectivity at specific ISPs or autonomous systems rather than imposing country-wide outages — evade country-level aggregation in automated detection systems, which are calibrated to detect national-scope disruptions.

2026-cheek-gaps-record-observability §3 Detection Gap Categories measurement-platformasn-blackholing