High-Performance Anonymity Framework

The prevalence of the world wide web has brought unparalleled convenience to our lives, but our reliance on the Internet has severe repercussions on our privacy, specially when information like the IP address of our broadband computers could be monitored.

The need for anonymity systems is driven by the lack of privacy on the world wide web. The ubiquity and reliability of modern hardware have allowed service providers to record and analyze endless amount of user data. We put together a demo to show how much information can a simple website can collect from visitors.

Who uses anonymity networks?
Anyone or any organization communicating sensitive information over the Internet can benefit from anonymity network.

Normal people: protect their identity and personal data from marketers and identity thieves.
Military and law enforcement: gather intelligence online without leaving traces. Communicating securely with field agents.
Journalists: protect identity of the sources

The official Tor website maintains a comprehensive list of practical uses for anonymity network.

Existing Solutions
Among the many anonymity services, Tor is the most widely used. Tor is a network of virtual tunnels that allows users to access the web anonymously.

Disadvantages of Tor and other existing solutions:
- Requires explicit application support
- Disregard applications’ bandwidth/latency requirements
- Centralized directory server are vulnerable to failure or compromise
- Poor performance on applications with high interactivity remote desktop) or high bandwidth (streamingvideo)

Application Aware Anonymity
A3, designed by Micah Sherr, is a distributed low‐latency network that provides anonymity between internal network nodes.

A3 combines the following components:
Distributed hash table: a class of decentralized distributed system that provide efficient lookup functions.
Network coordinate system: a low-overhead virtual positioning system for measuring various metrics (bandwidth, latency) between nodes.
metric-constrained path selection algorithm: a randomized algorithm for selecting onion path that adhere to some set of metrics constraints such as minimum bandwidth or maximum latency.

While the datagram protocol used by A3 is more efficient than stream-oriented protocol, network applications that uses TCP protocol can not interface with A3 network. A3, as it stands, has little practical value since it can only be accessed programmacally and limited to communication within the immediate network. We designed the anonymity proxy framework to solve the limitations of A3 and making it available to the masses.

High-Performance Anonymity Proxy Framework
The anonymity proxy framework is designed as a layer of abstraction over the A3 system and allow any user application to enter the A3 network and reach destinations outside of the network.

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