Analysis of an anonymity network for web browsing

Abstract

Various systems offering anonymity for near real-time Internet traffic have been operational. However, they did not deliver many quantitative results about performance, bandwidth overhead, or other issues that arise when im-plementing or operating such a system. Consequently, the problem of designing and operating these systems in a way that they provide a good balance between usability, pro-tection from attacks, and overhead is not well understood. In this paper, we present the analysis of an anonymity net-work for web browsing that offers a high level of anonymity against a sophisticated attacker and good end-to-end per-formance at a reasonable bandwidth overhead. We describe a novel way of operating the system that maximizes the pro-tection from traffic analysis attacks while minimizing the bandwidth overhead. We deliver quantitative results about the performance of our system, which should help to give a better understanding of anonymity networks.