Tokens for Anonymous Communications in the Internet

With the growth and acceptance of the Internet, there has been increased interest in maintaining anonymity in the network. Using traffic analysis, it is possible to infer who is talking to whom over a public network. This work develops a novel approach to hide the senders and the receivers of messages. Routes are chosen and frames traverse these routes. Each frame consists of a token and a node can send a message through a frame only when the corresponding token is free. The best thing about our protocol is that it poses no bandwidth overhead when there is at least some traffic while posing minimal bandwidth overhead when there is no traffic at all.