P5: A protocol for scalable anonymous communication

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Sherwood, Rob | Bhattacharjee, Bobby | Srinivasan, Aravind

Affiliations: University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA. E-mail: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]

Abstract: We present a protocol for anonymous communication over the Internet. Our protocol, called P5 (Peer-to-Peer Personal Privacy Protocol) provides sender–, receiver–, and sender–receiver anonymity. P5 is designed to be implemented over the current Internet protocols, and does not require any special infrastructure support. A novel feature of P5 is that it allows individual participants to trade-off degree of anonymity for communication efficiency, and hence can be used to scalably implement large anonymous groups. We present a description of P5, an analysis of its anonymity and communication efficiency, and evaluate its performance using detailed packet-level simulations.

Keywords: Anonymous communication, privacy, peer-to-peer

DOI: 10.3233/JCS-2005-13602

Journal: Journal of Computer Security, vol. 13, no. 6, pp. 839-876, 2005