Rumor Riding: Anonymizing Unstructured Peer-to-Peer Systems

Although anonymizing Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems often incurs extra costs in terms of transfer efficiency, many systems try to mask the identities of their users for privacy considerations. Existing anonymity approaches are mainly path-based: peers have to pre-construct an anonymous path before transmission. The overhead of maintaining and updating such paths is significantly high. In this paper, we propose Rumor Riding (RR), a lightweight mutual anonymity protocol for decentralized P2P systems. RR employs a random walk scheme which frees initiating peers from the heavy load of path construction. Compared with previous RSA-based anonymity approaches, RR also takes advantage of lower cryptographic overhead by mainly utilizing a symmetric cryptographic algorithm to achieve anonymity. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this design through trace-driven simulations. The analytical and experimental results show that RR is more efficient than existing protocols. We also discuss our early implementation experiences with the RR prototype.