Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in
Book cover

International Workshop on Privacy Enhancing Technologies

PET 2006: Privacy Enhancing Technologies pp 190–207Cite as

Improving Sender Anonymity in a Structured Overlay with Imprecise Routing

  • Conference paper

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 4258))

Abstract

In the framework of peer to peer distributed systems, the problem of anonymity in structured overlay networks remains a quite elusive one. It is especially unclear how to evaluate and improve sender anonymity, that is, untraceability of the peers who issue messages to other participants in the overlay. In a structured overlay organized as a chordal ring, we have found that a technique originally developed for recipient anonymity also improves sender anonymity. The technique is based on the use of imprecise entries in the routing tables of each participating peer. Simulations show that the sender anonymity, as measured in terms of average size of anonymity set, decreases slightly if the peers use imprecise routing; yet, the anonymity takes a better distribution, with good anonymity levels becoming more likely at the expenses of very high and very low levels. A better quality of anonymity service is thus provided to participants.

This research is supported by the Italian FIRB project Webminds.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Aspnes, J., Shah, G.: Skip Graphs. In: Proc. of the 14th Annual ACM-SIAM Symp. on Discrete Algorithms (SODA 2003) (January 2003)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Bennett, K., Grothoff, C.: GAP: Practical Anonymous Networking. In: Dingledine, R. (ed.) PET 2003. LNCS, vol. 2760, Springer, Heidelberg (2003)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  3. Bennett, K., Grothoff, C., Horozov, T., Patrascu, I.: Efficient Sharing of Encrypted Data. In: Batten, L.M., Seberry, J. (eds.) ACISP 2002. LNCS, vol. 2384, pp. 107–120. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  4. Berthold, O., Federrath, H., Köpsell, S.: Web MIXes: A System for Anonymous and Unobservable Internet Access. In: Federrath, H. (ed.) Designing Privacy Enhancing Technologies. LNCS, vol. 2009, pp. 115–129. Springer, Heidelberg (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Borisov, N., Waddle, J.: Anonymity in Structured Peer-to-Peer Networks (December 2003), gnunet.org/papers/borisov_waddle.pdf

  6. Castro, M., Druschel, P., Kermarrec, A.M., Rowstron, A.: Scribe: A Large-scale and Decentralized Application-level Multicast Infrastructure. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, special issue on Network Support for Multicast Communications 20(8) (October 2002)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Chaum, D.: Untraceable electronic mail, return addresses, and digital pseudonyms. Communications of the ACM 2 (February 1981)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Chaum, D.: The Dining Cryptographers Problem: Unconditional Sender and Recipient Untraceability. Journal of Cryptology 1(1), 65–75 (1988)

    Article  MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  9. Ciaccio, G.: The NEBLO homepage, http://www.disi.unige.it/project/neblo/

  10. Ciaccio, G.: Recipient Anonymity in a Structured Overlay. In: Proc. of the International Conference on Internet and Web Applications and Services (ICIW 2006), Guadeloupe, French Caribbean, February 2006, IEEE, Los Alamitos (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Clarke, I., Sandberg, O., Wiley, B., Hong, T.W.: Freenet: A Distributed Anonymous Information Storage and Retrieval System. In: Proc. of Designing Privacy Enhancing Technologies: Workshop on Design Issues in Anonymity and Unobservability (PET), July 2000, pp. 46–66 (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Cox, R., Muthitacharoen, A., Morris, R.: Serving DNS using a Peer-to-Peer Lookup Service. In: Druschel, P., Kaashoek, M.F., Rowstron, A. (eds.) IPTPS 2002. LNCS, vol. 2429, Springer, Heidelberg (2002)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  13. Dabek, F., Kaashoek, M.F., Karger, D., Morris, R., Stoica, I.: Wide-area Cooperative Storage with CFS. In: Proc. of 18th ACM Symp. on Operating Systems Principles (October 2001)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Dabek, F., Li, J., Sit, E., Robertson, J., Kaashoek, M.F., Morris, R.: Designing a DHT for low latency and high throughput. In: Proc. of the 1st USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 2004), San Francisco, CA (March 2004)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Díaz, C., Seys, S., Claessens, J., Preneel, B.: Towards measuring anonymity. In: Dingledine, R., Syverson, P.F. (eds.) PET 2002. LNCS, vol. 2482, Springer, Heidelberg (2003)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  16. Dingledine, R., Freedman, M.J., Molnar, D.: The Free Haven Project: Distributed Anonymous Storage Service. In: Federrath, H. (ed.) Designing Privacy Enhancing Technologies. LNCS, vol. 2009, Springer, Heidelberg (2001)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  17. Eriksson, J., Faloutsos, M., Krishnamurthy, S.: PeerNet: Pushing Peer-to-Peer Down the Stack. In: Kaashoek, M.F., Stoica, I. (eds.) IPTPS 2003. LNCS, vol. 2735, Springer, Heidelberg (2003)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  18. Kubiatowicz, J., et al.: Oceanstore: An Architecture for Global-scale Persistent Storage. In: Proc. of ACM ASPLOS (November 2000)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Freedman, M.J., Morris, R.: Tarzan: A peer-to-peer anonymizing network layer. In: Proc. of the 9th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2002), Washington, DC (November 2002)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Goldberg, I.: A Pseudonymous Communications Infrastructure for the Internet. PhD thesis, UC Berkeley (December 2000)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Gummadi, K., Gummadi, R., Gribble, S., Ratnasamy, S., Shenker, S., Stoica, I.: The Impact of DHT Routing Geometry on Resilience and Proximity. In: Proc. of ACM SIGCOMM (August 2003)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Gupta, A., Liskov, B., Rodrigues, R.: One Hop Lookups for Peer-to-peer Overlays. In: Proc. of the 9th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS-IX), Lihue, Hawaii (May 2003)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Gupta, I., Birman, K., Linga, P., Demers, A., van Renesse, R.: Kelips: Building an Efficient and Stable P2P DHT Through Increased Memory and Background Overhead. In: Kaashoek, M.F., Stoica, I. (eds.) IPTPS 2003. LNCS, vol. 2735, Springer, Heidelberg (2003)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  24. Harvey, N., Jones, M.B., Saroiu, S., Theimer, M., Wolman, A.: Skipnet: A Scalable Overlay Network with Practical Locality Properties. In: Proc. of the 4th USENIX Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems (USITS 20) (March 2003)

    Google Scholar 

  25. Hazel, S., Wiley, B.: Achord: A Variant of the Chord Lookup Service for Use in Censorship Resistant Peer-to-Peer Publishing Systems. In: Druschel, P., Kaashoek, M.F., Rowstron, A. (eds.) IPTPS 2002. LNCS, vol. 2429, Springer, Heidelberg (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  26. Kannan, J., Bansal, M.: Anonymity in Chord (December 2002), http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/kjk/chord-anon.ps

  27. Leong, B., Li, J.: Achieving One-Hop DHT Lookup and Strong Stabilization by Passing Tokens. In: Proc. of the 12th International Conference on Networks (ICON) (November 2004)

    Google Scholar 

  28. Malkhi, D., Naor, M., Ratajczak, D.: Viceroy: A Scalable and Dynamic Emulation of the Butterfly. In: Proc. of ACM PODC (August 2002)

    Google Scholar 

  29. Manku, G.S., Bawa, M., Raghavan, P.: Symphony: Distributed Hashing in a Small World. In: Proc. of the fourth USENIX Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems (USITS 2003), Seattle, WA (March 2003)

    Google Scholar 

  30. Maymounkov, P., Mazières, D.: Kademlia: A Peer-to-peer Information System Based on the XOR Metric. In: Druschel, P., Kaashoek, M.F., Rowstron, A. (eds.) IPTPS 2002. LNCS, vol. 2429, Springer, Heidelberg (2002)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  31. Mislove, A., Oberoi, G., Post, A., Reis, C., Druschel, P., Wallach, D.S.: AP3: Cooperative, Decentralized Anonymous Communication. In: Proc. of 11th ACM SIGOPS European Workshop, Leuven, Belgium (September 2004)

    Google Scholar 

  32. O’Donnell, C., Vaikuntanathan, V.: Information Leak in the Chord Lookup Protocol. In: Proc. of the 4th IEEE Int.l Conf. on Peer-to-Peer Computing (P2P 2004), Zurich, Switzerland (August 2004)

    Google Scholar 

  33. Perlegos, P.: DoS Defense in Structured Peer-to-Peer Networks. Technical Report UCB-CSD-04-1309, U.C. Berkeley (March 2004)

    Google Scholar 

  34. Pugh, W.: Skip Lists: a Probabilistic Alternative to Balanced Trees. Comm. of ACM 33(6), 668–676 (1990)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  35. Ratnasamy, S., Francis, P., Handley, M., Karp, R., Shenker, S.: A Scalable Content-Addressable Network. In: Proc. of ACM SIGCOMM (August 2001)

    Google Scholar 

  36. Ratnasamy, S., Handley, M., Karp, R., Shenker, S.: Application-level Multicast Using Content-addressable Networks. In: Proc. of 3rd Int.l Workshop on Networked Group Communication (November 2001)

    Google Scholar 

  37. Rohrer, J.: MUTE: Simple, Anonymous File Sharing, http://mute-net.sourceforge.net/

  38. Rowstron, A., Druschel, P.: Pastry: Scalable, Distributed Object Location and Routing for Large-scale Peer-to-peer Systems. In: Proc. of Int.l Conf. on Distributed System Platforms (November 2001)

    Google Scholar 

  39. Rowstron, A., Druschel, P.: Storage Management and Caching in PAST, a Large-scale, Persistent Peer-to-peer Storage Utility. In: Proc. of 18th ACM Symp. on Operating Systems Principles (October 2001)

    Google Scholar 

  40. Serjantov, A.: Anonymizing Censorship Resistant Systems. In: Druschel, P., Kaashoek, M.F., Rowstron, A. (eds.) IPTPS 2002. LNCS, vol. 2429, Springer, Heidelberg (2002)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  41. Serjantov, A., Danezis, G.: Towards an information theoretic metric for anonymity. In: Dingledine, R., Syverson, P.F. (eds.) PET 2002. LNCS, vol. 2482, Springer, Heidelberg (2003)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  42. Sherwood, R., Bhattacharjee, B., Srinivasan, A.: P5: A protocol for scalable anonymous communication. In: Proc. of the 2002 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (May 2002)

    Google Scholar 

  43. Singh, A., Liu, L.: Agyaat: Providing Mutually Anonymous Services over Structured P2P Networks. Technical Report GIT-CERCS-04-12, Georgia Inst. of Tech. CERCS (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  44. Stoica, I., Adkins, D., Zhuang, S., Shenker, S., Surana, S.: Internet Indirection Infrastructure. In: Proc. of ACM SIGCOMM (August 2002)

    Google Scholar 

  45. Stoica, I., Morris, R., Karger, D., Kaashoek, M.F., Balakrishnan, H.: Chord: a Scalable Peer-to-peer Lookup Service for Internet Applications. In: Proc. of ACM SIGCOMM (August 2001)

    Google Scholar 

  46. Waldman, M., Rubin, A., Cranor, L.: Publius: A Robust, Tamper-evident, Censorship-resistant and Source-anonymous Web Publishing System. In: Proc. of the 9th USENIX Security Symposium, August 2000, pp. 59–72 (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  47. Wang, J., Lu, L., Chien, A.: Tolerating Denial-of-Service Attacks Using Overlay Networks - Impact of Topology. In: Proc. of ACM Workshop on Survivable and Self-Regenerative Systems (October 2003)

    Google Scholar 

  48. Zhao, B.Y., Kubiatowicz, J.D., Joseph, A.D.: Tapestry: An Infrastructure for Fault-resilient Wide-area Location and Routing. Technical Report UCB-CSD-01-1141, U.C. Berkeley (April 2001)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. DISI, Università di Genova, via Dodecaneso 35, 16146, Genova, Italy

    Giuseppe Ciaccio

Authors
  1. Giuseppe Ciaccio
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK

    George Danezis

  2. Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Rd, 94304, Palo Alto, CA, USA

    Philippe Golle

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Ciaccio, G. (2006). Improving Sender Anonymity in a Structured Overlay with Imprecise Routing. In: Danezis, G., Golle, P. (eds) Privacy Enhancing Technologies. PET 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4258. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11957454_11

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11957454_11

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-68790-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-68793-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation