AntCom: An effective and efficient anti-tracking system with dynamic and asymmetric communication channel

Abstract

The increasingly rampant network monitoring and tracing bring the huge challenge on the protection of network users’ privacy. Even though the existing anonymous systems mitigate these threats, they often sacrifice anonymity for efficiency or vice-versa. Systems that offer strong privacy guarantees, such as Dissent, have high cost in computation and communication efficiency. Scalable systems, such as Tor, have low resistance to traffic analysis. We present AntCom, an effective and efficient communication system that provides low latency and high tracking-resistance. AntCom improves the tracking-resistance of communication via bidirectional ring communication. Different with the communication path with multiple hops, AntCom establishes a communication ring which is constructed by several nodes in bidirectional ring structure. The communication ring randomly chooses its exit node by collaborative decryption to deliver the message to achieve the dynamics of communication path. Because of the bidirectional ring structure, the uplink and downlink of two users’ communication will be split in the communication ring. Then, AntCom decrease the overlap of the paths in the uplink and downlink, and improves the tracking-resistance when confronted with the association-analysis based network tracing. Our evaluations of AntCom in latency overhead and tracking-resistance show that the latency of AntCom is linearly proportional to the size of communication ring, and the tracking-resistance of AntCom performs better than the multi-hops based anonymous system.