A practical authentication protocol for anonymous web browsing

Abstract

Authentication protocols with anonymity attract wide attention in recent years since they could protect users’ privacy. Anonymous web browsing refers to utilization of the World Wide Web that hides a user’s personally identifiable information from the websites visited. Even if a user can hide the IP address and other physical information with anonymity programs such as Tor, the web server can always monitor the user on the basis of the identity. In this paper, we propose a practical authentication protocol for anonymous web browsing. In the proposed protocol, we take the advantages of a pseudo identity mechanism and an identity-based elliptic curve cryptography algorithm to achieve the user anonymity, robust security as well as high efficiency. The results of security analysis and performance evaluation indicate the feasibility and practicality of our proposed anonymous authentication protocol.