``Low cost and reliable mutual anonymity protocols in peer-to-peer
networks"

Li Xiao, Zhichen Xu, and Xiaodong Zhang

IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, Vol. 14, No. 9,
2003, pp 829-840.

Abstract

We present several protocols to achieve mutual communication
anonymity between an information requester and a provider in a P2P
information-sharing environment such that neither the requester, nor the
provider can identify each other, and no other peers can identify the
two communicating parties with certainty.  Compared with two existing
protocols, our protocols improve efficiency in two different ways. First,
utilizing trusted third parties and aiming at both reliability and
low-cost, we propose a group of mutual anonymity protocols. We show that
with some limited central support, our protocols can accomplish the goals
of anonymity, efficiency, and reliability.  Second, we propose a mutual
anonymity protocol which relies solely on self-organizations among peers
without any trusted central controls.  We have evaluated our techniques
in a browser-sharing environment. We show that the average increase in
response time caused by our protocols is trivial, and these protocols
show advantages over existing protocols in a P2P system.

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