Rumor Riding: Anonymizing Unstructured Peer-to-Peer Systems

Although anonymizing Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems often incurs extra traffic costs, many systems try to mask the identities of their users for privacy considerations. Existing anonymity approaches are mainly path-based: peers have to pre-construct an anonymous path before transmission. The overhead of maintaining and updating such paths is significantly high. We propose Rumor Riding (RR), a lightweight and non-path-based mutual anonymity protocol for decentralized P2P systems. Employing a random walk mechanism, RR takes advantage of lower overhead by mainly using the symmetric cryptographic algorithm. We conduct comprehensive trace-driven simulations to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of this design, and compare it with previous approaches. We also introduce some early experiences on RR implementations.

[1]  Alhussein A. Abouzeid,et al.  Modeling and analysis of random walk search algorithms in P2P networks , 2005 .

[2]  Matthew K. Wright,et al.  Timing Attacks in Low-Latency Mix Systems (Extended Abstract) , 2004, Financial Cryptography.

[3]  Riccardo Bettati,et al.  Analysis of flow-correlation attacks in anonymity network , 2007, Int. J. Secur. Networks.

[4]  Paul F. Syverson,et al.  Onion routing , 1999, CACM.

[5]  Jia Wang,et al.  Analyzing peer-to-peer traffic across large networks , 2004, IEEE/ACM Trans. Netw..

[6]  David Chaum,et al.  Untraceable electronic mail, return addresses, and digital pseudonyms , 1981, CACM.

[7]  Ibrahim Matta,et al.  BRITE: an approach to universal topology generation , 2001, MASCOTS 2001, Proceedings Ninth International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems.

[8]  Daniel Stutzbach,et al.  Characterizing unstructured overlay topologies in modern P2P file-sharing systems , 2008, TNET.

[9]  Brian Neil Levine,et al.  Responder anonymity and anonymous peer-to-peer file sharing , 2001, Proceedings Ninth International Conference on Network Protocols. ICNP 2001.

[10]  Adi Shamir,et al.  A method for obtaining digital signatures and public-key cryptosystems , 1978, CACM.

[11]  Ittai Abraham,et al.  Probabilistic Quorums for Dynamic Systems , 2003, DISC.

[12]  Lada A. Adamic,et al.  Search in Power-Law Networks , 2001, Physical review. E, Statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics.

[13]  Riccardo Bettati,et al.  Correlation-Based Traffic Analysis Attacks on Anonymity Networks , 2010, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems.

[14]  Song Jiang,et al.  LightFlood: Minimizing Redundant Messages and Maximizing Scope of Peer-to-Peer Search , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems.

[15]  Edith Cohen,et al.  Search and replication in unstructured peer-to-peer networks , 2002 .

[16]  Nick Mathewson,et al.  Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router , 2004, USENIX Security Symposium.

[17]  Aravind Srinivasan,et al.  Efficient lookup on unstructured topologies , 2005, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications.

[18]  Anand Sivasubramaniam,et al.  SSW: A Small-World-Based Overlay for Peer-to-Peer Search , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems.

[19]  Christos Gkantsidis,et al.  Random walks in peer-to-peer networks , 2004, IEEE INFOCOM 2004.

[20]  Aravind Srinivasan,et al.  P/sup 5/ : a protocol for scalable anonymous communication , 2002, Proceedings 2002 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.

[21]  Stefan Saroiu,et al.  A Measurement Study of Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Systems , 2001 .

[22]  George Danezis,et al.  Low-cost traffic analysis of Tor , 2005, 2005 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P'05).

[23]  Li Xiao,et al.  Location awareness in unstructured peer-to-peer systems , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems.

[24]  Christos Gkantsidis,et al.  Conductance and congestion in power law graphs , 2003, SIGMETRICS '03.

[25]  Micah Adler,et al.  The predecessor attack: An analysis of a threat to anonymous communications systems , 2004, TSEC.

[26]  Michael K. Reiter,et al.  Crowds: anonymity for Web transactions , 1998, TSEC.

[27]  Michael Kaminsky,et al.  SybilGuard: defending against sybil attacks via social networks , 2008, TNET.

[28]  Li Xiao,et al.  Low-Cost and Reliable Mutual Anonymity Protocols in Peer-to-Peer Networks , 2003, IEEE Trans. Parallel Distributed Syst..