Anonymous communications on the Internet

For many internet applications, it may be advantageous or essential and even critical to protect the identity of participants. Anonymous communication strategies mostly shield the sender of messages from identification. This paper presents a protocol for anonymous communication over internet that can also provide receiver anonymity. Our system is designed to provide anonymity under a rather strong adversarial model in terms of identification, anonymity and resilience to collusion, along with low latency of data delivery and the link utilization. We use a tree-like overlay network, composed of nodes that are interested in mutual anonymity. We present a description of the protocol, an analysis of its anonymity and communication efficiency, and evaluate its performance using message-level simulations.