THE UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY A Practical Buses Protocol for Anonymous Network Communication
Andreas Hirt, Christian Hirt · 2004
The need to communicate anonymously over the Internet has increased with the proliferation of networked computers. Applications such as military communications, Web browsing, e-voting, and e-counseling for victims of abuse all require anonymous communication. Without anonymity, individuals may refrain from communicating for fear of retribution, potentially resulting in social, psychological, or financial losses, or even the loss of life. This thesis contains a comprehensive survey and analysis of anonymous commu-nication schemes. Analysis of the prior literature shows that there is no secure and scalable anonymous communication scheme. Previous literature has only analyzed each scheme for a subset of the known attacks. In this thesis, the analysis is extended to assess the anonymity capabilities of these schemes with respect to all known at-tacks. It is shown that none of the scalable anonymous communication schemes are secure. The thesis contains a description of the design, implementation, and evaluation