Persona: Network Layer Anonymity and Accountability for Next Generation Internet

摘要

Individual privacy has become a major concern, due to the intrusive nature of the services and websites that collect increasing amounts of private information. One of the notions that can lead towards privacy protection is that of anonymity. Unfortunately, anonymity can also be maliciously exploited by attackers to hide their actions and identity. Thus some sort of accountability is also required. The current Internet has failed to provide both properties, as anonymity techniques are difficult to fully deploy and thus are easily attacked, while the Internet provides limited level of accountability. The Next Generation Internet (NGI) provides us with the opportunity to examine how these conflicting properties could be efficiently applied and thus protect users' privacy while holding malicious users accountable. In this paper we present the design of a scheme, called Persona that can provide anonymity and accountability in the network layer of NGI. More specifically, our design requirements are to combine these two conflicting desires in a stateless manner within routers. Persona allows users to choose different levels of anonymity, while it allows the discovery of malicious nodes.