Anonymous addresses for efficient and resilient routing in F2F overlays

Friend-to-friend (F2F) overlays, which restrict direct communication to mutually trusted parties, are a promising substrate for privacy-preserving communication due to their inherent membership-concealment and Sybil-resistance. Yet, existing F2F overlays suffer from a low performance, are vulnerable to denial-of-service attacks, or fail to provide anonymity. In particular, greedy embeddings allow highly efficient communication in arbitrary connectivity-restricted overlays but require communicating parties to reveal their identity. In this paper, we present a privacy-preserving routing scheme for greedy embeddings based on anonymous return addresses rather than identifying node coordinates. We show that the return addresses allow plausible deniability. Furthermore, we enhance the routing's resilience by using multiple embeddings and propose a method for efficient content addressing. Our extensive simulation study on real-world data indicates that our approach is highly efficient and effectively mitigates failures as well as powerful denial-of-service attacks.