Incentive-Driven P2P Anonymity System: A Game-Theoretic Approach

– Anonymous communication systems built on P2P infrastructures using anonymity forwarders are frequently affected by the churn problem, i.e. frequent joins and leaves of nodes. The problem unavoidably affects the quality of provided anonymity: The availability of anonymity forwarders will be decreased, which reduces the anonymity set; and the frequency of path reformation will increase, which increases the chance of successful intersection attacks. We propose an incentive-based P2P mechanism as an approach to providing reliable anonymity forwarding. It uses incentives to induce the peer nodes to provide anonymity forwarding as reliable service and to make stable and distributed forwarding decisions to minimize the frequency of path reformations. To support incentive, a payment system has been designed which meet the anonymity requirement and can handle typical scenarios of cheating and malicious attacks. To make sound forwarding decisions, we use game theory to carefully design the f...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ICPP
• Authors: Souvik Ray, Giora Slutzki, Zhao Zhang
• Keywords: Anonymity, Anonymity Forwarders, Anonymity Forwarding, Distributed And Parallel Computing, ICPP 2007