Mutual Anonymity Protocols for Hybrid Peer-to-Peer Systems

  • Authors:
  • Li Xiao;Zhichen Xu;Xiaodong Zhang

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • ICDCS '03 Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

In a hybrid peer-to-peer (P2P) system, some operationsare intentionally centralized, such as indexing of peers' files.We present several protocols to achieve mutual communicationanonymity between an information requester and aprovider in a hybrid P2P information-sharing environmentwith trusted index servers such that neither the requester,nor the provider can identify each other, and no other peerscan identify the two communicating parties with certainty.Some existing protocols provide solutions to achieve mutualanonymity in pure P2P systems without any trusted centralcontrols. Compared with two representative protocols, ourproposed mutual anonymity protocols improve efficiency byutilizing trusted third parties and aiming at both reliabilityand low-cost. We show that with some limited central support,our protocols can accomplish the goals of anonymity,efficiency, and reliability. We have evaluated our techniquesin a browser-sharing environment. We show that the averageincrease in response time caused by our protocols is trivial,and these protocols show advantages over existing protocolsin a hybrid P2P system.