Group Routing: a Reliable Mutual Anonymous Approach in Dynamic Overlay

As an important component of online privacy, anonymity is concerned by all users of P2P system. 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. In this paper, we propose Group Routing (GR), an approach which is based on Onion Routing, to provide reliability as well as mutual anonymity. In GR, every stage of the preconstructed path contains several nodes to be redundancies each others, and the messages are encrypted and split into several packages to be forward to destination in the path. Compared with previous approaches that focus on reliability of anonymous communication, GR takes advantage of higher reliability and anonymity. We demonstrate the effectiveness of GR through theoretical analysis and simulations. The analytical and experimental results show GR is more efficient to other proposals.