Jump Routing: Toward Scalable and Lightweight Anonymous Network
Yusheng Xia, Jinshu Su, Rongmao Chen, Congxi Song · IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security · 2025
Including TOR, most of the anonymous communication systems adopt source routing, that the source has to share the globally consistent view of all relays and maintain the up-to-date information. To increase the scalability of TOR, researchers mainly utilize hop-by-hop routing during circuit extension. However, hop-by-hop routing has not been widely deployed since it suffers from route capture attacks, and most of the countermeasures require the source participate in the route extension indirectly, help verify the selection of next hop by intermediate nodes, thus introduces communication overhead. In this paper, we introduce a novel routing scheme called Jump Routing. In jump routing, the route extension follows the jumping way, that each relay chooses the successor of the next hop rather than the next hop itself. In particular, to the best of our knowledge, we are the first to route in the jumping way. In addition, to defend route capture attacks, enhance data privacy, and defend collusion attacks, we propose multiple schemes including jump verification, jump encryption, and corporative jump verification. Different from previous measures on route capture attacks, jump routingdoes not need the participation of the source, but deals with the attack by intermediate nodes only. We manage to realize the full jump routing prototype, and the evaluation results show that our jump routing is scalable, lightweight, and resilient.