Networks without user observability
Computers and Security
Crowds: anonymity for Web transactions
ACM Transactions on Information and System Security (TISSEC)
Untraceable electronic mail, return addresses, and digital pseudonyms
Communications of the ACM
Tarzan: a peer-to-peer anonymizing network layer
Proceedings of the 9th ACM conference on Computer and communications security
Hordes: a multicast based protocol for anonymity
Journal of Computer Security
Introducing MorphMix: peer-to-peer based anonymous Internet usage with collusion detection
Proceedings of the 2002 ACM workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society
Secure and Private Distribution of Online Video and Some Related Cryptographic Issues
ACISP '01 Proceedings of the 6th Australasian Conference on Information Security and Privacy
IPTPS '01 Revised Papers from the First International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems
An Efficient and Practical Scheme for Privacy Protection in the E-Commerce of Digital Goods
ICISC '00 Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Information Security and Cryptology
Tools for privacy preserving distributed data mining
ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter
Information sharing across private databases
Proceedings of the 2003 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data
Anonymous Connections and Onion Routing
SP '97 Proceedings of the 1997 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
A Commutative Encrypted Protocol for the Privacy Protection of Watermarks in Digital Contents
HICSS '04 Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 37th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'04) - Track 4 - Volume 4
AP3: cooperative, decentralized anonymous communication
Proceedings of the 11th workshop on ACM SIGOPS European workshop
Cashmere: resilient anonymous routing
NSDI'05 Proceedings of the 2nd conference on Symposium on Networked Systems Design & Implementation - Volume 2
Tor: the second-generation onion router
SSYM'04 Proceedings of the 13th conference on USENIX Security Symposium - Volume 13
Information leaks in structured peer-to-peer anonymous communication systems
Proceedings of the 15th ACM conference on Computer and communications security
"Super nodes" in Tor: existence and security implication
Proceedings of the 27th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference
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With rising concerns on user privacy over the Internet, anonymous communication systems that hide the identity of a participant from its partner or third parties are highly desired. Existing approaches either rely on a relative small set of pre-selected relay servers to redirect the messages, or use structured peer-to-peer systems to multicast messages among a set of relay groups. The pre-selection approaches provide good anonymity, but suffer from node failures and scalability problem. The peer-to-peer approaches are subject to node churns and high maintenance overhead, which are the intrinsic problems of P2P systems. In this paper, we present CAT, a node-failure-resilient anonymous communication protocol. In this protocol, relay servers are randomly assigned to relay groups. The initiator of a connection selects a set of relay groups instead of relay servers to set up anonymous paths. A valid path consists of relay servers, one from each selected relay group. The initiator explores valid anonymous paths via a probing process. Since the relative positions of relay servers in the path are commutative, there exist multiple anonymous yet commutative paths, which form an anonymous tunnel. When a connection encounters a node failure, it quickly switches to a nearest backup path in the tunnel through "path hopping", without tampering the initiator or renegotiating the keys. Hence, the protocol is resilient to node failures. We also show that the protocol provides good anonymity even when facing types of active and passive attacks. Finally, the operating cost of CAT is analyzed and shown to be similar to other node-based anonymous communication protocols.