On the Impact of Cross-Layer Information Leakage on Anonymity in Crowds
Andriy Panchenko · 2015
Common anonymizers focus only on a part of the users' personal identification information, namely on the network addresses of the communicating parties. In the light of the entire communication stack, even if the network addresses are perfectly anonymized, information leakage at one of the other layers can completely wipe out the entire effort. No popular anonymization network follows a holistic approach; all neglect the other layers. For example, at the application layer, they neither filter out nor even warn about information that may look innocent to the end-user, though it may be revealing.