Hiding in Plain Sight: Exploiting Broadcast for Practical Host Anonymity

Users are being tracked on the Internet more than ever before as Web sites and search engines gather pieces of information sufficient to identify and study their behavior. While many existing schemes provide strong anonymity, they are inappropriate when high bandwidth and low latency are required. In this work, we explore an anonymity scheme for end hosts whose performance makes it possible to have it always on. The scheme leverages the natural grouping of hosts in the same subnet and the universally available broadcast primitive to provide anonymity at line speeds. Our scheme is strongly resistant against all active or passive adversaries as long as they are outside the subnet. Even within the subnet, our scheme provides reasonable resistance against adversaries, providing anonymity that is suitable for common Internet applications.