One of the most important issues in peer-to-peer networks is anonymity. The major anonymity for peer-to-peer users concerned with the users' identities and actions which can be revealed by any other members. There are many approaches proposed to provide anonymous peer-to-peer communications. An intruder can get information about the content of the data, the sender's and receiver's identities. Anonymous approaches are designed with the following three goals: to protect the identity of provider, to protect the identity of requester and to protect the contents of transferred data between them. This article presents a new peer-to-peer approach to achieve anonymity between a requester and a provider in peer-to-peer networks with trusted servers called suppernode so that the provider will not be able to identify the requester and no other peers can identify the two communicating parties with certainty. This article shows that the proposed algorithm improved reliability and has more security. This algorithm, based on onion routing and randomization, protects transferring data against traffic analysis attack. The ultimate goal of this anonymous communications algorithm is to allow a requester to communicate with a provider in such a manner that nobody can determine the requester's identity and the content of transferred data.
Dual-Path is an anonymous peer-to-peer approach which provides requester anonymity. This approach provides anonymity between a requester and a provider in peer-to-peer networks with trusted servers called suppernode so the provider will not be able to identify the requester and no other peers can identify the two communicating parties with certainty. Dual-Path establishes two paths for transmitting data. These paths called Request path and Response path. The first one is used for requesting data and the second one is used for sending the requested data to the requester. As Dual-Path approach i…
Dining-cryptographers networks (DCN) can achieve information-theoretical privacy. Unfortunately, they are not well suited for peer-to-peer networks as they are used in blockchain applications to disseminate transactions and blocks among participants. In previous but preliminary work, we proposed a threephase approach with an initial phase based on a DCN with a group size of k while later phases take care of the actual broadcast within a peer-to-peer network. This paper describes our DCN protocol in detail and adds a performance evaluation powered by our proof-of-concept implementation. Our con…
The existing peer-to-peer networks have several problems such as fake content distribution, free riding, white-washing and poor search scalability, lack of a robust trust model and absence of user privacy protection mechanism. Although, several trust management and semantic community-based mechanisms for combating free riding and distribution of malicious contents have been proposed by some researchers, most of these schemes lack scalability due to their high computational, communication and storage overhead. This paper presents a robust trust management scheme for P2P networks that utilizes t…
The architectures of deployed anonymity systems such as Tor suffer from two key problems that limit user's trust in these systems. First, paths for anonymous communication are built without considering trust relationships between users and relays in the system. Second, the network architecture relies on a set of centralized servers. In this paper, we propose Pisces, a decentralized protocol for anonymous communications that leverages users' social links to build circuits for onion routing. We argue that such an approach greatly improves the system's resilience to attackers. A fundamental chall…
Considering topologies of anonymous networks we used to organizing anonymous communication into hard to trace paths hiding its origin or destination. In anonymity the company is crucial, however the serial transportation imposes a costly tradeoff between a level of privacy and a speed of communication. This paper introduces a framework of a novel architecture for anonymous networks that hides initiators of communications by parallelization of anonymous links. The new approach, which is based on the grounds of the anonymous P2P network called P2Priv, does not require content forwarding via a ch…
Ever since the introduction of the internet, it has been void of any privacy. The majority of internet traffic currently is and always has been unencrypted. A number of anonymous communication overlay networks exist whose aim it is to provide privacy to its users. However, due to the nature of the internet, there is major difficulty in getting these networks to become both decentralized and anonymous. We list reasons for having anonymous networks, discern the problems in achieving decentralization and sum up the biggest initiatives in the field and their current status. To do so, we use one ex…
Voice Service Providers (VSPs) participating in VoIP peering frequently want to withhold their identity and related privacy-sensitive information from other parties during the VoIP communication. A number of existing documents on VoIP privacy exist, but most of them focus on end user privacy. By summarizing and extending existing work, we present a unified privacy mechanism for both VoIP users and service providers. We also show a case study on how VSPs can use this mechanism for identity and topology hiding in VoIP peering.
In an interdomain network, autonomous systems (ASes) often establish peering agreements, so that one AS (agreement consumer) can influence the routing policies of the other AS (agreement provider). Peering agreements are implemented in the BGP configuration of the agreement provider. It is crucial to verify their implementation because one error can lead to disastrous consequences. However, the fundamental challenge for peering agreement verification is how to preserve the privacy of both ASes involved in the agreement. To this end, this paper presents IVeri, the first privacy-preserving inter…
Concerns for the privacy of communication is widely discussed in research and overall society. For the public financial infrastructure of blockchains, this discussion encompasses the privacy of transaction data and its broadcasting throughout the network. To tackle this problem, we transform a discrete-time protocol for contact networks over infinite trees into a computer network protocol for peer-to-peer networks. Peer-to-peer networks are modeled as organically growing graphs. We show that the distribution of shortest paths in such a network can be modeled using a normal distribution $\mathc…
Anonymous networks have enabled secure and anonymous communication between the users and service providers while maintaining their anonymity and privacy. The hidden services in the networks are dynamic and continuously change their domains and service features to maintain anonymity and prevent fingerprinting. This makes modelling of such networks a challenging task. Further, modelling with crisp graphs is not suitable as they cannot capture the dynamic nature of the anonymous networks. In this work, we model the anonymous networks using fuzzy graphs and provide a methodology to simulate and an…
Open and anonymous nature of peer to peer networks provides an opportunity to malicious peers to behave unpredictably in the network. This leads the lack of trust among the peers. To control the behavior of peers in the network, reputation system can be used. In a reputation system, aggregation of trust is a primary issue. Algorithm for aggregation of trust should be designed such that, it can converge to a certain finite value. Absolute Trust is one of the algorithm, which is used for the aggregation of trust in peer to peer networks. In this letter, we present the generalized analysis of con…
Content-centric networking -- also known as information-centric networking (ICN) -- shifts emphasis from hosts and interfaces (as in today's Internet) to data. Named data becomes addressable and routable, while locations that currently store that data become irrelevant to applications. Named Data Networking (NDN) is a large collaborative research effort that exemplifies the content-centric approach to networking. NDN has some innate privacy-friendly features, such as lack of source and destination addresses on packets. However, as discussed in this paper, NDN architecture prompts some privacy …
Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged as a key technology for next generation wireless broadband networks showing rapid progress and inspiring numerous compelling applications. A WMN comprises of a set of mesh routers (MRs) and mesh clients (MCs), where MRs are connected to the Internet backbone through the Internet gateways (IGWs). The MCs are wireless devices and communicate among themselves over possibly multi-hop paths with or without the involvement of MRs. User privacy and security have been primary concerns in WMNs due to their peer-to-peer network topology, shared wireless medium,…
Distributed anonymity services, such as onion routing networks or cryptocurrency tumblers, promise privacy protection without trusted third parties. While the security of these services is often well-researched, security implications of their required bootstrapping processes are usually neglected: Users either jointly conduct the anonymization themselves, or they need to rely on a set of non-colluding privacy peers. However, the typically small number of privacy peers enable single adversaries to mimic distributed services. We thus present AnonBoot, a Sybil-resistant medium to securely bootstr…
We propose an efficient framework for enabling secure multi-party numerical computations in a Peer-to-Peer network. This problem arises in a range of applications such as collaborative filtering, distributed computation of trust and reputation, monitoring and other tasks, where the computing nodes is expected to preserve the privacy of their inputs while performing a joint computation of a certain function. Although there is a rich literature in the field of distributed systems security concerning secure multi-party computation, in practice it is hard to deploy those methods in very large scal…
Wireless service providers track the time and location of all user connections. Location inference attacks have been effective in revealing the identity of anonymous users of wireless services. In this paper, we propose ZipPhone, a solution that leverages existing cellular infrastructure to improve user privacy. Spartacus allows a community of users to strategically time their connections to remain anonymous while incurring a minimal loss of utility. We evaluate ZipPhone from the perspective of a cell service provider and a community of privacy-seeking users, and quantify the privacy/utility t…
Widespread use of sensors and multisensory personal devices generate a lot of personal information. Sharing this information with others could help in various ways. However, this information may be misused when shared with all. Sharing of information between trusted parties overcomes this problem. This paper describes a model to share information based on interactions and opinions to build trust among peers. It also considers institutional and other controls, which influence the behaviour of the peers. The trust and control build confidence. The computed confidence bespeaks whether to reveal i…
A multitude of privacy breaches, both accidental and malicious, have prompted users to distrust centralized providers of online social networks (OSNs) and investigate decentralized solutions. We examine the design of a fully decentralized (peer-to-peer) OSN, with a special focus on privacy and security. In particular, we wish to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of user content and the privacy of user relationships. We propose DECENT, an architecture for OSNs that uses a distributed hash table to store user data, and features cryptographic protections for confidentiality…
