Is there any good reason to run I2P over a VPN? Let’s say that you have a machine dedicated for that one purpose and you don’t care if the world sees that you are running I2P traffic. Is there any benefit, security-wise or other, to doing it over a VPN?
If I2P is banned in your country or if your ISP is closing the ports you need
I think using a 3rd party VPN with Tor or i2p would reduce your anonymity. Although the messages are encrypted, your isp knows who you are communicating with. The VPN is a second potential observer that all the messages are passing through. If the VPN is on the other end of a tor exitproxy or an i2p exitproxy like false.i2p that is even worse because the proxy is likely to know your identity and you are essentially de-anonymizing yourself by funnelling everything through the VPN.
As others noted, the VPN could be useful if your isp is blocking access to i2p servers. Another obscure use case would be to use a vpn (purchased anonymously) after an exitproxy to anonymously take advantage of the geopositioning feature of some VPN services. Tor itself can do that if you luck upon a server in the desired region. Tor likewise could be used to bypass isp restrictions. If you operate a VPN as part of your personal network, there could be a use case that would involve using Tor as a proxy (possibly with some kind of additional tunneling for udp) to then connect to your VPN.
If one of the servers on your VPN is serving content to i2p, that would entail a pairing of VPN and i2p inasnuch as you use the VPN to gain administrative access to the server.
Sure, I agree that a VPN should be helpful in those cases. But is there any other reason to use one?
Not really and there is clear documentation about the potential risks of misconfiguration when it comes to VPN and Tor. I’ve not really looked into the technical differences between tor and i2p but I suspect the same risks apply.
Pretty much but you would have to do a long series of really stupid things to dox yourself using a VPN and I2P
Same could be said for running a VPN with Tor I’m sure. It’s the potential for misconfiguration that seems to be the biggest issue. Again, I’m not too sure about i2p. I only even know about i2p because Monero planned on using it at one time. Not sure they ever did tho as I lost interest.