Application Aware Anonymity (A³)

Overview

Application-Aware Anonymity (A³) is an extensible platform for applications to deploy anonymity-based services on the Internet. A³ allows applications to tailor their anonymity properties and performance characteristics according to their specific communication requirements. For example, A³ permits an anonymous voice-over-IP application to produce anonymous paths with low latency and jitter, while providing anonymous file transfer applications with high bandwidth (but not necessarily low latency or jitter) routes.

To support flexible path construction, A³ exposes a declarative language (A³Log) that enables applications to compactly specify path selection and instantiation policies which are then executed using a declarative networking engine. We demonstrate that our declarative language is sufficiently versatile to represent novel multi-metric performance constraints as well as existing relay selection algorithms used by Tor and other anonymity systems, using only a few lines of concise code. In addition to specifying relay selection strategies, senders are able to use our declarative techniques to construct anonymous tunnels according to their specifications (for example, via Onion Routing or Crowds). We experimentally evaluate the A³ system using a combination of trace-driven simulations and deployment on PlanetLab. Our experimental results demonstrate that the A³ system can flexibly support a wide range of path selection and instantiation strategies at low performance overhead.

 

Project Members

 

Papers

• Micah Sherr, Andrew Mao, William R. Marczak, Wenchao Zhou, Boon Thau Loo, and Matt Blaze. A³: An Extensible Platform for Application-Aware Anonymity. To appear in 17th Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), February 2010.
• Micah Sherr. Coordinate-Based Routing for High Performance Anonymity. PhD Thesis, University of Pennsylvania, July 2009.
• Micah Sherr, Matt Blaze, and Boon Thau Loo. Scalable Link-Based Relay Selection for Anonymous Routing. In Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2009), August 2009
• Micah Sherr, Matt Blaze, and Boon Thau Loo. Veracity: Practical Secure Network Coordinates via Vote-based Agreements. In USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX '09), June 2009.
• Micah Sherr, Boon Thau Loo, and Matt Blaze. Veracity: A fully decentralized service for securing network coordinate systems. In 7th International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS 2008), February 2008.
• Micah Sherr, Boon Thau Loo, and Matt Blaze. Towards Application-Aware Anonymous Routing. In Second USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Security (HotSec), August 2007.

 

Contact Info

For more information, please email Micah Sherr.

 

Acknowledgments

The A³ project is partially supported by NSF Grants CNS-0831376, CNS-0524047, CNS-0627579, and NeTS-0721845. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.