AP3: Cooperative, Decentralized Anonymous Communication

Authors

Alan Mislove
Gaurav Oberoi
Ansley Post
Charles Reis
Peter Druschel
Dan S. Wallach

Abstract

This paper describes a cooperative overlay network that provides anonymous communication services for participating users. The Anonymizing Peer-to-Peer Proxy (AP3) system provides clients with three primitives: (i) anonymous message delivery, (ii) anonymous channels, and (iii) secure pseudonyms. AP3 is designed to be lightweight, low-cost and provides ``probable innocence'' anonymity to participating users, even under a large-scale coordinated attack by a limited fraction of malicious overlay nodes. Additionally, we use AP3's primitives to build novel anonymous group communication facilities (multicast and anycast), which shield the identity of both publishers and subscribers.

Published

11th ACM SIGOPS European Workshop (Leuven, Belgium), September 2004.

Text

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