The cost of becoming anonymous: on the participant payload in crowds

Authors:
Hongfei Sui;Jianxin Wang;Jianer Chen;Songqiao Chen
Affiliations:
Institute of Computer Theory and Software, College of Information Science and Engineering, Central South University, ChangSha, Hunan 410083, PR China;Institute of Computer Theory and Software, College of Information Science and Engineering, Central South University, ChangSha, Hunan 410083, PR China;Institute of Computer Theory and Software, College of Information Science and Engineering, Central South University, ChangSha, Hunan 410083, PR China and Department of Computer Science, Texas A&M ...;Institute of Computer Theory and Software, College of Information Science and Engineering, Central South University, ChangSha, Hunan 410083, PR China
Venue:
Information Processing Letters
Year:
2004

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Abstract

Crowds is a recently proposed protocol for anonymous communication, which is based on the idea of"blending into a crowd". Thus, each participant of the crowd gets the benefits of anonymity but also serves as a proxy for other participants. An important measure of the protocol is the participant payload in the system, which is measured by the amount of work a participant needs to pay on serving as a proxy for any communication requested by the participants in the system. In this paper, we derive a precise formula for the participant payload in Crowds, which improves the previous results. Moreover. our result shows the first time that the participant payload in Crowds is entirely independent of the size of the crowd. In consequence, Crowds protocol has a very nice scalability property.