Anonymity Scheme for Interactive P2P Services

Abstract

The flourishing of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) applications has encouraged extensive research on end-to-end anonymity. In particular, interactive services such as VoIP and instant messaging are becoming extremely popular and require low latency. Preserving the anonymity of users in such services is becoming a major challenge. While existing schemes provide anonymity for the communicating parties; they incur high latency and are not suitable for interactive services. Even designs that attempt to reduce the latency, employ an encryption scheme that involves a comparatively high computation overhead and delay. In this paper, we describe a novel low-latency P2P scheme that provides anonymity for both senders and receivers while adhering to low bounds of delay, communication and bandwidth overheads. The design offers resistance against various attacks including a coalition of malicious peers. It has inherited scalability and fault tolerance and is applicable for various interactive P2P services.