A Feeder-Carrier-Based Internet User Accountability Service
Lei Deng, Aleksandar Kuzmanovic · 2009
This paper presents IDnet mesh, a general-purpose user identity architecture for the Internet, which provides a scalable common identity validation service to the public. This common service can enable diversified new Internet services as well as new features for existing ones. It builds upon a novel feeder-carrier identity architecture which increases resilience to rising provider-initiated surveillance attempts. It offers a regular approach to connect a user’s online identity with the user’s real identity and meanwhile fully preserves the user’s privacy on the public Internet. Our system adopts a practical trust model such that it yields high system evolvability towards global deployment; it requires no change to the current Internet infrastructure and protocols, and therefore is completely incrementally deployable. We use a Linux-based implementation of IDnet mesh algorithm and protocols at a cluster of servers in Emulab to perform benchmarks for the core algorithm and to test the functional integrity of the protocol implementation. We perform extensive evaluation of IDnet mesh’s scalability, security, efficiency, and reliability. Finally, we assess the overhead induced by our system in the cases of Email and Web services and demonstrate that IDnet mesh can be scalably integrated with these services.