Dynamic Multipath Onion Routing in Anonymous Peer-To-Peer Overlay Networks

— Although recent years provided many protocols for anonymous routing in overlay networks, they commonly rely on the same communication paradigm: Onion Routing. In Onion Routing a static tunnel through an overlay network is build via layered encryption. All traffic exchanged by its end points is relayed through this tunnel. In contrast, this paper introduces dynamic multipath Onion Routing to extend the static Onion Routing paradigm. This approach allows each packet exchanged between two end points to travel along a different path. To provide anonymity the first half of this path is selected by the sender and the second half by the receiver of the packet. The results are manifold: First, dynamic multipath Onion Routing increases the resilience against threats, especially pattern and timing based analysis attacks. Second, the dynamic paths reduce the impact of misbehaving and overloaded relays. Finally, inspired by Internet routing, the forwarding nodes do not need to maintain any s...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: GLOBECOM
• Authors: Olaf Landsiedel, Lexi Pimenidis, Klaus Wehrle, Heiko Niedermayer, Georg Carle
• Keywords: Dynamic Multipath Onion, GLOBECOM 2007, Onion Routing, Overlay Networks, Telecommunications