NISAN: network information service for anonymization networks

Network information distribution is a fundamental service for any anonymization network. Even though anonymization and information distribution about the network are two orthogonal issues, the design of the distribution service has a direct impact on the anonymization. Requiring each node to know about all other nodes in the network (as in Tor and AN.ON – the most popular anonymization networks) limits scalability and offers a playground for intersection attacks. The distributed designs existing so far fail to meet security requirements and have therefore not been accepted in real networks. In this paper, we combine probabilistic analysis and simulation to explore DHT-based approaches for distributing network information in anonymization networks. Based on our findings we introduce NISAN, a novel approach that tries to scalably overcome known security problems. It allows for selecting nodes uniformly at random from the full set of all available peers, while each of the nodes has on...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: CCS
• Authors: Andriy Panchenko, Stefan Richter, Arne Rache
• Keywords: Anonymization Networks, CCS 2009, Network Information Distribution, Popular Anonymization Networks, Security Privacy