Hybrid Routing: A Mutual Anonymous Approach with Improved Reliability

As an important component of online privacy, anonymity is a concern of all users of P2P systems. Many methods are proposed to provide mutual anonymity and most of them are path-based: an anonymous path should be constructed by source peer before transmission. Although those proposals perform well in providing mutual anonymity, the pre-constructed paths suffer from node churn and make anonymous transmission unreliable. Different from traditional solutions, this paper presents Hybrid Routing (HR), a novel approach to provide reliability as well as mutual anonymity. Besides using redundancy, HR also provides reliability by shortening the pre-constructed path and employs Rumor Riding scheme to guarantee source anonymity. Compared with previous approaches that focus on reliability of anonymous communication, HR takes advantage of higher reliability and anonymity. We demonstrate the effectiveness of HR through theoretical analysis and simulations. The analytical and experimental results show HR is more efficient than other proposals.