Internet anonymity: Problems and solutions

Abstract

Internet services like the World Wide Web or email programs are already widely in use for private and business work. Unfortunately, with every access a lot of user-specific information is leaked. Hence, using popular Internet-services results in threats against user privacy, as this data can be eavesdropped by attackers or collected by service providers in order to create user profiles. To defeat such threats anonymizer services have been introduced especially for anonymous email and net news. But the available anonymizing services lack a lot of deficiencies and do not provide the required degree of anonymity to Internet users. This is mainly because theses services have been implemented in a rather ad hoc manner lacking a systematic analysis. The Anonymous-project aimed at revealing and overcoming the deficiencies of existing approaches by following a systematic methodology. Our paper summarizes the main results of the Anonymous-project. It explains the problems and limitations of current anonymizing services and presents our new services. © 2002 Kluwer Academic / Plenum Publishers, New York.