An efficient anonymous scheme for mutual anonymous communications

Due to the rising of on-line computer and communication applications, users require an anonymous channel to transfer sensitive or confidential data on the networks. How to construct a safe communication environment to guarantee the mutual anonymity during communications becomes an important problem. Recently, researchers have focused on applying the ALR (application-level routing) framework to perform private communications on top of IP networks. The Freenet system is one of the most famous models. Like other ALR solutions, Freenet needs no special device to support mutual anonymous communications. However, it stores and backwards response data over the entire routing path, which causes lots of time and resources wasted. Although the result of our previous research [11] has already improved the performance of Freenet, the location of the source peer still remains unprotected. In this paper, we apply anonymous-shortcut on mutual anonymous communications. The proposed mechanism permits users to choose different security levels on their own demands for not only the request peer but also the source peer. It provides anonymous delivery to support real-time communications [9-10] with acceptable security and controllable delay.