CliqueNet: A Self-Organizing, Scalable, Peer-to-Peer Anonymous Communication Substrate

Abstract

Anonymity is critical for many networked applications. Yet current Internet protocols provide no support for masking the identity of communication endpoints. This paper outlines a design for a peer-to-peer, scalable, tamper-resilient communication protocol that provides strong anonymity and privacy. Called CliqueNet, our protocol provides an information-theoretic guarantee: an omnipotent adversary that can wiretap at any location in the network cannot determine the sender of a packet beyond a clique, that is, a set of k hosts, where k is an anonymizing factor chosen by the participants. CliqueNet is resilient to jamming by malicious hosts and can scale with the number of participants. This paper motivates the need for an anonymous communication layer and describes the self-organizing, novel divide-and-conquer approach that enables CliqueNet to scale while offering a strong anonymity guarantee. CliqueNet is widely applicable as a communication substrate for peer-to-peer applications that require anonymity, privacy and anti-censorship guarantees.