Recipient Anonymity in a Structured Overlay

An open problem in structured overlay networks is related to the anonymity to be provided to recipients, namely, those nodes who respond to request messages. Such a feature is of main concerns when designing censorship-resistant distributed applications. In this paper it is shown that, in a chordal ring overlay, by enforcing a degree of imprecision in each peer’s routing table we obtain better recipient anonymity while keeping the length of routing paths within logarithmic length. A suitable metrics for recipient anonymity is established, based on the amount of resources an adversary needs in order to break anonymity of recipients in the overlay. In terms of this metrics, it is shown that imprecise routing tables make it impossible for a "small" coalition of malicious peers to correlate overlay addresses to hosts for censorship or auditing purposes.

[1]  Vinod Vaikuntanathan,et al.  Information leak in the Chord lookup protocol , 2004 .

[2]  Vinod Vaikuntanathan,et al.  Information leak in the Chord lookup protocol , 2004, Proceedings. Fourth International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing, 2004. Proceedings..

[3]  Robert Tappan Morris,et al.  Tarzan: a peer-to-peer anonymizing network layer , 2002, CCS '02.

[4]  David Mazières,et al.  Kademlia: A Peer-to-Peer Information System Based on the XOR Metric , 2002, IPTPS.

[5]  David R. Karger,et al.  Chord: A scalable peer-to-peer lookup service for internet applications , 2001, SIGCOMM '01.

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

[7]  George Danezis,et al.  Towards an Information Theoretic Metric for Anonymity , 2002, Privacy Enhancing Technologies.

[8]  Bart Preneel,et al.  Towards Measuring Anonymity , 2002, Privacy Enhancing Technologies.

[9]  David Chaum,et al.  The dining cryptographers problem: Unconditional sender and recipient untraceability , 1988, Journal of Cryptology.

[10]  Ben Y. Zhao,et al.  An Infrastructure for Fault-tolerant Wide-area Location and Routing , 2001 .

[11]  Antony I. T. Rowstron,et al.  Pastry: Scalable, Decentralized Object Location, and Routing for Large-Scale Peer-to-Peer Systems , 2001, Middleware.

[12]  Christian Grothoff,et al.  gap - Practical Anonymous Networking , 2003, Privacy Enhancing Technologies.

[13]  Michael B. Jones,et al.  SkipNet: A Scalable Overlay Network with Practical Locality Properties , 2003, USENIX Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems.

[14]  Ian Goldberg,et al.  A pseudonymous communications infrastructure for the internet , 2000 .

[15]  Paul F. Syverson,et al.  Anonymous connections and onion routing , 1998, IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun..

[16]  Gurmeet Singh Manku,et al.  Symphony: Distributed Hashing in a Small World , 2003, USENIX Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems.

[17]  Nikita Borisov,et al.  Anonymity in Structured Peer-to-Peer Networks , 2003 .

[18]  Peter Druschel,et al.  Pastry: Scalable, distributed object location and routing for large-scale peer-to- , 2001 .

[19]  Marco Aiello,et al.  Proceedings of the Advanced International Conference on Telecommunications and International Conference on Internet and Web Applications and Services (AICT/ICIW 2006) , 2006 .

[20]  Steven Hazel,et al.  Achord: A Variant of the Chord Lookup Service for Use in Censorship Resistant Peer-to-Peer Publishing Systems , 2002 .

[21]  Michalis Faloutsos,et al.  PeerNet: Pushing Peer-to-Peer Down the Stack , 2003, IPTPS.

[22]  G. Ciaccio.  Evaluating Sender and Recipient Anonymity in a Structured Overlay , 2022 .

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

[24]  James Aspnes,et al.  Skip graphs , 2003, SODA '03.

[25]  Mark Handley,et al.  A scalable content-addressable network , 2001, SIGCOMM '01.

[26]  Ian Clarke,et al.  Freenet: A Distributed Anonymous Information Storage and Retrieval System , 2000, Workshop on Design Issues in Anonymity and Unobservability.

[27]  Scott Shenker,et al.  Internet indirection infrastructure , 2004, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.

[28]  Andrei Serjantov,et al.  Anonymizing Censorship Resistant Systems , 2002, IPTPS.