A Node-failure-resilient Anonymous Communication Protocol through Commutative Path Hopping

Abstract—With rising concerns on user privacy over the Internet, anonymous communication systems that hide the identity of a participant from its partner or third parties are highly desired. Existing approaches either rely on a relative small set of pre-selected relay servers to redirect the messages, or use structured peer-to-peer systems to multicast messages among a set of relay groups. The pre-selection approaches provide good anonymity, but suffer from node failures and scalability problem. The peer-to-peer approaches are subject to node churns and high maintenance overhead, which are the intrinsic problems of P2P systems. In this paper, we present CAT, a node-failure-resilient anonymous communication protocol. In this protocol, relay servers are randomly assigned to relay groups. The initiator of a connection selects a set of relay groups instead of relay servers to set up anonymous paths. A valid path consists of relay servers, one from each selected relay group. The initiator...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Fengjun Li, Bo Luo, Peng Liu, Chao-Hsien Chu
• Keywords: Anonymous Communication, Communications, INFOCOM 2010, Relay, Relay Servers