Anonymous connections and onion routing

TLDR

Onion routing provides anonymous connections resistant to eavesdropping and traffic analysis, allowing unmodified Internet applications to use proxies that strip identifying information, and has been implemented on Sun Solaris 2.X for web browsing, remote logins, and e‑mail. This paper aims to detail the implemented onion routing system, analyze its vulnerabilities, and report performance results. The authors present vulnerability analysis and performance results for the implemented system.

Abstract

Onion routing provides anonymous connections that are strongly resistant to both eavesdropping and traffic analysis. Unmodified Internet applications can use these anonymous connections by means of proxies. The proxies may also make communication anonymous by removing identifying information from the data stream. Onion routing has been implemented on Sun Solaris 2.X with proxies for Web browsing, remote logins and e-mail. This paper's contribution is a detailed specification of the implemented onion routing system, a vulnerability analysis based on this specification, and performance results.