Collaborative Research: Anonymous Protocols

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The purpose of this work is to support the understanding and development of protocolsthat can provide personal privacy over the Internet. While there have been some protocolsproposed and implemented that hide the IP address of network communicators, there has beenno systematic study of such protocols, nor have methods of analyzing the anonymity and securityof those protocols been developed. A thorough understanding of anonymity is important not onlyfor the development, analysis, and use of anonymous protocols for personal privacy, but also forunderstanding how network attackers can hide their location and for developing methods to trackthose attackers. Our eventual goal is to develop new techniques and protocols for anonymity,including a \logic of anonymity" similar to those developed for authentication protocols thatcan be used to describe and analyze anonymous protocols.This proposal considers a number of contributions on this research area. Our first contri-bution will be to take a more general view of anonymous communication than previous workby considering protocols and techniques for hiding the identity of a responder from all otherparties, and for providing completely anonymous communication in which both the initiator andresponder are anonymous to each other and all other parties. The former technique is usefulfor anonymous web sites (rather than just anonymous web browsing); the later technique isuseful for true two-party privacy over the Internet. Our second class of contributions will be toconsider generalized protocol construction. This extends our past work, which de-coupled theforward and reverse paths of anonymous communication, giving rise to a large family of anony-mous protocols. We will continue investigation of those protocols, and examine what networksupport is available for anonymous communication and what support might best be provided inthe future. Our third contribution will be to provide a formalism for anonymous protocols suchthat beliefs regarding entity identities can be reasoned by stating assumptions and deriving log-ical conclusions from following steps of defined protocols. Fourth, we will consider the networkperformance of anonymous routing protocols in an in-depth fashion, including not only latencyand traffic, but also requirements of streaming media applications and traditional TCP-basedbulk-data transfer applications. Finally, we will consider heretofore ignored security concernsof existing protocols, initially considering path analysis attacks and attacks that cause someparticipants to be unfairly accused by third parties. The formalism provided by our proposedlogic of anonymity will be a foundational component of our security analysis work.Collaboration between these our two institutions will allow us to leverage the existingstrength in networking at the University of Massachusetts and the existing strength in secu-rity at Purdue.1