Anonymous and analysable web browsing

Despite the enactment of several privacy laws by the governments of several nations, achieving user privacy on the Internet has remained elusive, primarily due to the conflicting objectives of the stakeholders, i.e., users, web-based service providers, represented primarily by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and governments. Internet usage data is still collected by ISPs and in certain jurisdictions is mandated by law, even with the inherent risk of possible data breaches that this brings. Data breaches have become very common nowadays and have affected several large renowned organizations and are likely to occur again in the future. To this end, it is not uncommon to find certain users resorting to the user of peer-to-peer anonymity services like Tor. According to Tor metrics, at least 2 million people use Tor on a daily basis. This number would probably be higher if more users were aware of online privacy risks and were tech-savvy enough to install it on their systems. Using services like Tor, however has its downside, primarily because its legitimate users are likely to be viewed suspiciously by law enforcement due to the abuse of the service by criminal elements. In this paper, we propose a web access protocol that guarantees basic user anonymity while trying to achieve a compromise on the conflicting objectives of the stakeholders. The protocol simultaneously provides anonymity to the user, allows the web usage data to be analyzed by interested parties (e.g., the ISP), and reduces the risk of abuse by criminal elements thereby allowing for flexibility in the enactment of laws that mandate collection of web usage information in support of law enforcement. The main techniques used in our protocol are: (i) the Onion Protocol, which is used to conceal web users' identities, (ii) the Secure Computation, which allows the parties (user and ISP) to jointly compute a common function while keeping those inputs private, (iii) and the Licensing and Digital Certificates, which ensure that only authorized web-content providers can provide content to users who want to be anonymous and that no one can impersonate the service providers licensed to provide services anonymously.