Towards Transparent Anonymity for User-controlled Servers Supporting Collaborative Scenarios

The increasing tendency of using user-controlled servers for supporting different scenarios from leisure and professional life raises new security challenges. Especially when those servers are used to support collaborative scenarios (e.g., communication and sharing with others), the requirement for anonymity at the network level should be supported in an efficient way. In this paper we present a specific communication scenario that could lead to link ability even though anonymous networks are used. The requirements gathering is based on realistic requirements from the EU FP7 di.me project requiring to empower lay end-users to collaborate with their contacts. Thereby anonymity at the network level also needs to be considered in order to disguise the physical location of the users and also of their server(s). We present an approach satisfying these anonymity requirements by means of a Tor based software component in order to overcome such privacy problems. First results are presented and the portability of the suggested solution for similar settings as well as future work directions are discussed.