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 Voice over IP (VoIP) 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 sender and receiver while adhering to strict and 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, such as instant messaging, VoIP and video conference.