A new website called “Silk Road Reloaded” wants to become the new marketplace for illegal products. Strangely, it does not rely on Tor, a service that anonymizes traffic, but the Invisible Internet Project (I2P) anonymizing network. Two months after the Silk Road 2.0 closure by the FBI, the new site launched yesterday as reported by the site Motherboard.

The purpose of the site is to provide an exchange for drugs, forgery, hacking tools and false banknotes, to name a few. Weapons and stolen credit card numbers, however, are not currently part of the catalog.

Moreover, while many other markets in the darknet only accept cryptocurency Bitcoin, Silk Road Reloaded will use a total of eight different forms of cryptocurrency, including Bitcoin, Anoncoin, Litecoin, Feathercoin or even Dogecoin, a version of the digital currency based on a meme that was popular in December 2013.

I2P network

After the closure of Silk Road 2.0, black markets struggled to find an alternative to set up illegal site fearing that Tor had been compromised or can be compromised. Silk Road 2.0 operated exclusively on the “Tor” network and required all transactions to be paid for in bitcoins in order to preserve its users’ anonymity and evade detection by law enforcement. FBI arrested the site’s alleged operator–26-year old Blake Benthall (aka “Defcon”), and he’s now been charged with drug trafficking, conspiracy to commit computer hacking, and money laundering, potentially facing a life sentence of imprisonment.

Silk Road Reloaded is using the least recognized I2P anonymous network layer instead of Tor. Unlike the Tor network, which is based on a network of volunteers that allow anonymous traffic data, anonymous I2P network uses a peer-to-peer system so that each user is a node on the network that contributes to anonymize the traffic for all users.

Why I2P instead Tor? It’s hard to say because the Silk Road Reloaded authors offer no explanation on this point. Established in 2003, I2P claims a higher degree of distribution and therefore a lower surface of attack.

The creators of the I2P discuss the differences: “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.”

According to this Wikipedia entry, I2P uses a variation of the famous Tor onion routing, called “routing garlic”. With I2P, the message undergoes a succession of ciphers, but is packaged along with messages from other users. This has the effect of blurring even more tracks. However, as I2P is much less used than Tor, few studies have been performed on it. We therefore do not really know the weaknesses and strengths of this technology.

The reloaded site

The site’s new administrator wrote that Silk Road Reloaded defended a key human right. “Who are we? Ones who care about true freedom, self-ownership and self-possession. Yes believe it or not you own yourself,” the site reads.

“We created this to allow the most basic of human activities to occur unimpeded, that being trade. It’s not only a major disruption of progress but, it is an interference to control someone to the degree that their free will is compromised. We may not be able to stop this but, we certainly won’t contribute to it.”

I2P operators say that the network is used “by many people who care about their privacy; activists, oppressed people, journalists and whistleblowers, as well as the average person.”

The Silk Road Reloaded site can be visited only when a user installs the I2P software on their computer. The software is still in beta, but according to the developers, the code is mature enough to be offered to the public.

According to Motherboard, the products listed in the new Silk Road are still only statements. An advertisement on the site, however, says that they will be replaced soon by the products of real sellers. The new space promises to accept more virtual coins, performing conversion to Bitcoin.

The first Silk Road was closed by FBI in October 2013. The second version, created soon after, was taken off the air by the FBI in November 2014 in a joint operation with Europol. At the time, more than 400 secret sites Tor network were removed from the air.

The first and the second versions of the site had no link between operators, except for the reuse of the brand to continue the ideals of the site, based on free trade of prohibited or restricted movement of products. There is no evidence that this third version has any relation to the above.

Courtroom illustration by Susie Cagle via Forbes