text: Modern low-latency anonymity systems, no matter whether constructed as an overlay or implemented at the network layer, offer limited security guarantees against traffic analysis. On the other hand, high-latency anonymity systems offer strong security guarantees at the cost of computational overhead and long delays, which are excessive for interactive applications. We propose TARANET, an anonymity system that implements protection against traffic analysis at the network layer, and limits the incurred latency and overhead. In TARANET's setup phase, traffic analysis is thwarted by mixing. In the data transmission phase, end hosts and ASes coordinate to shape traffic into constant-rate transmission using packet splitting. Our prototype implementation shows that TARANET can forward anonymous traffic at over 50 Gbps using commodity hardware.
  @cite_69: We present the first Internet architecture designed to provide route control, failure isolation, and explicit trust information for end-to-end communications. SCION separates ASes into groups of independent routing sub-planes, called trust domains, which then interconnect to form complete routes. Trust domains provide natural isolation of routing failures and human misconfiguration, give endpoints strong control for both inbound and outbound traffic, provide meaningful and enforceable trust, and enable scalable routing updates with high path freshness. As a result, our architecture provides strong resilience and security properties as an intrinsic consequence of good design principles, avoiding piecemeal add-on protocols as security patches. Meanwhile, SCION only assumes that a few top-tier ISPs in the trust domain are trusted for providing reliable end-to-end communications, thus achieving a small Trusted Computing Base. Both our security analysis and evaluation results show that SCION naturally prevents numerous attacks and provides a high level of resilience, scalability, control, and isolation.
  @cite_14: We present Tor, a circuit-based low-latency anonymous communication service. This second-generation Onion Routing system addresses limitations in the original design by adding perfect forward secrecy, congestion control, directory servers, integrity checking, configurable exit policies, and a practical design for location-hidden services via rendezvous points. Tor works on the real-world Internet, requires no special privileges or kernel modifications, requires little synchronization or coordination between nodes, and provides a reasonable tradeoff between anonymity, usability, and efficiency. We briefly describe our experiences with an international network of more than 30 nodes. We close with a list of open problems in anonymous communication.
  @cite_70: 
  @cite_55: 
  @cite_39: In today's Internet, users can choose their local Internet service providers (ISPs), but once their packets have entered the network, they have little control over the overall routes their packets take. Giving a user the ability to choose between provider-level routes has the potential of fostering ISP competition to offer enhanced service and improving end-to-end performance and reliability. This paper presents the design and evaluation of a new Internet routing architecture (NIRA) that gives a user the ability to choose the sequence of providers his packets take. NIRA addresses a broad range of issues, including practical provider compensation, scalable route discovery, efficient route representation, fast route fail-over, and security. NIRA supports user choice without running a global link-state routing protocol. It breaks an end-to-end route into a sender part and a receiver part and uses address assignment to represent each part. A user can specify a route with only a source and a destination address, and switch routes by switching addresses. We evaluate NIRA using a combination of network measurement, simulation, and analysis. Our evaluation shows that NIRA supports user choice with low overhead.
  @cite_43: Current low-latency anonymity systems use complex overlay networks to conceal a user's IP address, introducing significant latency and network efficiency penalties compared to normal Internet usage. Rather than obfuscating network identity through higher level protocols, we propose a more direct solution: a routing protocol that allows communication without exposing network identity, providing a strong foundation for Internet privacy, while allowing identity to be defined in those higher level protocols where it adds value. Given current research initiatives advocating "clean slate" Internet designs, an opportunity exists to design an internetwork layer routing protocol that decouples identity from network location and thereby simplifies the anonymity problem. Recently, proposed such a protocol (LAP), but it does not protect the user against a local eavesdropper or an untrusted ISP, which will not be acceptable for many users. Thus, we propose Dovetail, a next-generation Internet routing protocol that provides anonymity against an active attacker located at any single point within the network, including the user's ISP. A major design challenge is to provide this protection without including an application-layer proxy in data transmission. We address this challenge in path construction by using a matchmaker node (an end host) to overlap two path segments at a dovetail node (a router). The dovetail then trims away part of the path so that data transmission bypasses the matchmaker. Additional design features include the choice of many different paths through the network and the joining of path segments without requiring a trusted third party. We develop a systematic mechanism to measure the topological anonymity of our designs, and we demonstrate the privacy and efficiency of our proposal by simulation, using a model of the complete Internet at the AS-level.
  @cite_50: Popular anonymous communication systems often require sending packets through a sequence of relays on dilated paths for strong anonymity protection. As a result, increased end-to-end latency renders such systems inadequate for the majority of Internet users who seek an intermediate level of anonymity protection while using latency-sensitive applications, such as Web applications. This paper serves to bridge the gap between communication systems that provide strong anonymity protection but with intolerable latency and non-anonymous communication systems by considering a new design space for the setting. More specifically, we explore how to achieve near-optimal latency while achieving an intermediate level of anonymity with a weaker yet practical adversary model (i.e., protecting an end-host's identity and location from servers) such that users can choose between the level of anonymity and usability. We propose Lightweight Anonymity and Privacy (LAP), an efficient network-based solution featuring lightweight path establishment and stateless communication, by concealing an end-host's topological location to enhance anonymity against remote tracking. To show practicality, we demonstrate that LAP can work on top of the current Internet and proposed future Internet architectures.
summary: Recent research @cite_50 @cite_43 @cite_70 proposes that incorporate anonymous communication as a service of network infrastructures in the Internet and next generation network architectures @cite_39 @cite_55 @cite_69 . The basic assumption of a network-layer anonymity system is that Autonomous Systems (AS) can conduct efficient cryptographic operations when forwarding packets to conceal forwarding information. Additionally, a network-layer anonymity system uses direct forwarding paths rather than reroute packets through overlay networks as in Tor @cite_14 . This processing would be done on (software) routers, for instance, but more abstractedly the term is used to refer to the device or set of devices dedicated to the anonymity system within an AS.