Dovetail: Stronger Anonymity in Next-Generation Internet Routing

Given current research initiatives advocating “clean slate” Internet designs, researchers have the opportunity to design an internetwork layer routing protocol that provides efficient anonymity by decoupling identity from network location. Prior work in anonymity for the next-generation Internet fully trusts the user’s ISP. We propose Dovetail, which provides anonymity against an active attacker located at any single point within the network, including the user’s ISP. A major design challenge is to provide this protection without including an applicationlayer proxy in data transmission. We address this in path construction by using a matchmaker node (an end host) to overlap two path segments at a dovetail node (a router). The dovetail then trims away part of the path so that data transmission bypasses the matchmaker. We develop a systematic mechanism to measure the topological anonymity of our designs, and we demonstrate their privacy and efficiency by Internet-scale simulations at the AS-level.