Elliptic Curve Arithmetic in onion routing anonymity networks

This paper presents a novel use of Elliptic Curve Arithmetic to improve circuit construction in onion routing anonymity networks. The principal attraction of ECC, compared to RSA, is that it appears to offer equal security for a far smaller key size, thereby reducing processing overhead. Compared to previous designs, our algorithm provides practical forward secrecy and leads to a reduction in the required amount of authenticated directory information. In addition, it requires significantly less computation and communication than the previous designs. These properties suggest that our approach is a practical way to allow anonymity networks to scale gracefully.