A Survey of Anonymous Peer-to-Peer File-Sharing

This paper provides a survey of searchable, peer-to-peer file-sharing systems that offer the user some form of anonymity. We start this survey by giving a brief description of the most popular methods of providing anonymous communication. These include the Ants protocol, Onion routing, Multicasting, MIXes and UDP address spoofing. We then describe a number of implemented systems based on one, or a combination of, these methods. Finally, we discuss possible attacks on the anonymity of these systems and give examples of particular attacks and defences used by the systems we describe.

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