An Analysis of Anonymity Side Effects in the Internet of Services

The Internet of Services will facilitate cross-organizational collaboration by allowing companies to utilize services from external providers. Even though standard security mechanisms such as message encryption may be in place, attackers could create detailed profiles of service consumers, providers, and marketplaces by monitoring communication endpoints. This threatens the security objective of relationship anonymity and potentially permits sensitive information about the underlying business processes or relationships between service consumers and providers to be revealed. While state-of-the-art countermeasures in the form of anonymity systems allow this problem to be addressed, they may have undesired side effects on the Quality of Service. This work provides a detailed empirical analysis of these side effects, based on an extensive measurement of the response time, availability, and throughput of representative, globally distributed services. Our experimental results are available to the interested public within the comprehensive dataset WS-Anon.