P5 : a protocol for scalable anonymous communication

We present a protocol for anonymous communication over the Internet. Our protocol, called P⁵ (peer-to-peer personal privacy protocol) provides sender-, receiver-, and sender-receiver anonymity. P⁵ is designed to be implemented over current Internet protocols, and does not require any special infrastructure support. A novel feature of P⁵ is that it allows individual participants to trade-off degree of anonymity for communication efficiency, and hence can be used to scalably implement large anonymous groups. We present a description of P⁵, an analysis of its anonymity and communication efficiency, and evaluate its performance using detailed packet-level simulations.