Transparent low-latency network anonymisation for mobile devices

Abstract

Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets have become increasingly popular tools for Internet-based communication such as web browsing and text messaging. At the same time however, mobile devices fail to provide important privacy guarantees for their users. In particular, mobile devices per default neither conceal which services they are contacting nor hide their source IP addresses. Solutions to these problems exist, but either do not provide sufficient protection or have not gained widespread use due to a lack of usability. In this paper, we therefore present an architecture that combines the transparent tunneling of traffic with the strong protection of low-latency anonymisation networks. We furthermore present and discuss trade-offs that can be made to reduce the latency and overhead caused by the transparent tunneling of traffic. Based on measurements taken from a testbed setup, we show that our solution provides anonymity at the IP layer with acceptable energy consumption and goodput penalties.