Internet anonymity: problems and solutions

  • Authors:
  • Claudia Eckert;Alexander Pircher

  • Affiliations:
  • Univ. of Bremen, Bremen, Germany;Univ. of Bremen, Bremen, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Sec '01 Proceedings of the 16th international conference on Information security: Trusted information: the new decade challenge
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

Internet services like the World Wide Web or email programs are already widely in use for private and business work. Unfortunately, with every access a lot of user specific information is leaked. Hence, using popular internet-services results in threats against user privacy, as this data can be eavesdropped by attackers or collected by service providers in order to create user profiles. To defeat such threats anonymizer services have been introduced especially for anonymous email and news net news. But the available anonymizing services lack a lot of deficiencies and do not provided the required degree of anonymity to Internet users. This is mainly because thesis services have been implemented in rather ad hoc manner lacking a systematic analysis. The Anonymous-project aimed at revealing and overcoming the deficiencies of existing approaches by following a systematic methodology. Our paper summarizes the main results of the Anonymous-project. It explains the problems and limitations of current anonymizing services and presents our new services.