Age-based anonymity: a randomized routing approach to communication unobservability

Providing anonymous communication on networks of interconnected computers is an active area of research which aims to enhance the privacy of the users of such networks. Communication unobservability, stronger property compared to anonymity, attempts to guarantee that legitimate messages are not discernible from dummy traffic. A network with an active global adversary is one which it is assumed that all nodes in the network are potentially being monitored at all times, and also that at any time any node could be an adversary. This paper introduces a set of anonymous system design requirements for providing enhanced communication unobservability. A new anonymous networking system was designed based on these requirements to provide both sender and receiver anonymity. The proposed system has a structured peer-to-peer network architecture and a randomized routing algorithm to obfuscate the detection of communication paths and the message routing patterns. An age-based method is proposed to prevent even the first node after the sender from identifying the original sender. A simulation program was designed and implemented to test the proposed system. The effect of different parameters on the proposed algorithm is demonstrated using a simulation program.