A New Architecture for Anonymous Use of Services in Distributed Computing Networks

With the rapid development of the Internet, applications in distributed processing systems have attracted more and more attention. The privacy protection is one of the most important factors to ensure the security of underlying networks in a distributed computing system. Users expect to use a service (e.g., a computing service) anonymously, while service providers want to make sure that the users are trusted and their behavior can be accountable. Given that these two factors are contradictory, how to provide an efficient solution to achieve trusted anonymous access to the services in distributed computing networks is a challenging task. In a distributed computing system, when a task needs to be computed by a worker (or server), the transmitted data over the underlying network to perform this computing service might include many different contents, and even lots of different flows. To this end, this paper presents a new and efficient architecture to help users use services anonymously in distributed computing networks, without loss of trustworthiness. The experimental results show that the proposed architecture introduces acceptable overheads, and can achieve the goal of balancing anonymity and trust in distributed computing networks.