WAR: Wireless Anonymous Routing

Abstract

This talk is called Wireless Anonymous Routing, and of course that gives a nice acronym for going to DoD funding agencies: we need to contrive an acronym for civilian agencies that means the same thing. What the authors have in common is that we are all current or future former employees of AT&T Labs. [Laughter] As we are not all current former employees at the time of this workshop, perhaps it is best to strike that from the transcript, but then the production schedule may surprise us.

Anonymity in networks is something that we have found applications for and technologies for, for many years. There are some techniques for doing it that in fact are quite practical, and we see in things like mix networks, onion routing, the re-mailer networks, systems like Crowds and so forth. Interestingly we have almost an equal number of diverse applications that benefit from anonymity; things like electronic voting, digital cash, electronic publishing (both in the sense of reading as well as writing), and less discussed but probably more prevalent are tactical and military applications, such as battlefield and sensor networks.