PHI: Path-Hidden Lightweight Anonymity Protocol at Network Layer

Chen Chen, Adrian Perrig
2017 Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies  
We identify two vulnerabilities for existing highspeed network-layer anonymity protocols, such as LAP and Dovetail. First, the header formats of LAP and Dovetail leak path information, reducing the anonymity-set size when an adversary launches topological attacks. Second, ASes can launch session hijacking attacks to deanonymize destinations. HORNET addresses these problems but incurs additional bandwidth overhead and latency. In this paper, we propose PHI, a Path-HIdden lightweight anonymity
more » ... tocol that solves both challenges while maintaining the same level of efficiency as LAP and Dovetail. We present an efficient packet header format that hides path information and a new back-off setup method that is compatible with current and future network architectures. Our experiments demonstrate that PHI expands anonymity sets of LAP and Dovetail by over 30x and reaches 120 Gbps forwarding speed on a commodity software router.
doi:10.1515/popets-2017-0007 dblp:journals/popets/ChenP17 fatcat:tikbrtkb4zgqph5ys3blrkeb4q