A formal treatment of onion routing

Abstract

Anonymous channels are necessary for a multitude of privacy-protecting protocols. Onion routing is probably the best known way to achieve anonymity in practice. However, the cryptographic aspects of onion routing have not been sufficiently explored: no satisfactory definitions of security have been given, and existing constructions have only had ad-hoc security analysis for the most part. We provide a formal definition of onion-routing in the universally composable framework, and also discover a simpler definition (similar to CCA2 security for encryption) that implies security in the UC frame-work. We then exhibit an efficient and easy to implement construction of an onion routing scheme satisfying this definition. © International Association for Cryptologic Research 2005.