Proxies for Anonymous Routing

Abstract

Using traffic analysis, it is possible to infer who is talking to whom over a public network. This paper describes a flexible communications infrastructure, onion routing, which is resistant to traffic analysis. Onion routing lives just beneath the application layer, and is designed to interface with a wide variety of unmodified Internet services by means of proxies. Onion routing has been implemented on Sun Solaris 2.4; in addition, proxies for World Wide Web browsing (HTTP), remote logins (RLOGIN), e-mail (SMTP), and file transfers (FTP) have been implemented. Onion routing provides application independent, real-time, and bi-directional anonymous connections that are resistant to both eavesdropping and traffic analysis. Applications making use of onion routings anonymous connections may (and usually should) identify their users over the anonymous connection. User anonymity may be layered on top of the anonymous connections by removing identifying information from the data stream. Our goal here is anonymous connections, not anonymous communication. The use of a packet switched public network should not automatically reveal who is talking to whom. This is the traffic analysis that onion routing complicates.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 1996
Accession Number
ADA465331

Entities

People

  • David M. Goldschlag
  • Michael G. Reed
  • Paul Syverson

Organizations

  • United States Naval Research Laboratory

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Cyber

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Anonymous Communications
  • Application Protocols
  • Asymetric Encryption
  • Commerce
  • Computers
  • Cryptography
  • Cybersecurity
  • Denial Of Service Attack
  • Electronic Mail
  • Information Operations
  • Infrastructure
  • Internet
  • Network Protocols
  • Network Topology
  • Networks
  • Observers
  • Web Browsers

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Computer Networking

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML