Anonymous communication over invisible mix rings

Abstract

Protect the identity of participants may be advantageous or essential and even critical for many internet applications. Mix rings architecture give better performance than mix-nets while maintaining anonymity that is stronger than onion routing. This paper presents an enhancement of mix rings, which is a hybrid P2P system and is designed to provide anonymity under a strong adversarial model in terms of identification, anonymity and resilience to collusion, along with low latency of data delivery and the link utilization. We use a double-layer overlay network, composed of nodes that are interested in anonymity and trusted index nodes and introduce several cluster escape and random extend mechanisms into mix rings. We present a description of the protocol, an analysis of common attack defense, and evaluate the degree of anonymity using MATLAB simulations. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.