Unobservable Rendezvous Negotiation in P2P Networks

Abstract

Internet has been the most popular platform for individuals to communicate and share ideas. With increasing threats against network privacy, anonymous and covert communication technology is becoming more and more important. In this paper, an unobservable rendezvous negotiation protocol is proposed based on P2P architecture, which establishes a covert channel leveraging an existing DHT to hide communicating behaviors and utilizes a tagging mechanism to ensure an indirect identification and mutual authentication. Experiments indicate that performance of the protocol is acceptable, and security analysis shows that the protocol can resist various threats. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.