Maintaining Unlinkability in Group Based P2P Environments

In the wake of the success of peer-to-peer networking, privacy has arisen as a big concern. Even though steps have been taken in order to attain an anonymous communications channel, all approaches consider the overlay network as a single entity and none of them take into account peer group based environments. In this paper, we describe a method in order to maintain unlinkability in group membership authentication attempts when using peer groups relying on web-of-trust. Using this method, it is not possible to ultimately pinpoint a peer's identity despite the constraints of a group membership scenario.