Social networking for anonymous communication systems: A survey

Anonymous communication systems have been around for sometime, providing anonymity, enhanced privacy, and censorship circumvention. A lot has been done, since Chaum´s seminal paper on mix networks, in preventing attacks able to undermine the anonymity provided by these systems. This, however, is goal difficult to achieve due to the de-centralized nature of these systems. In the end it boils down to finding a subset of trusted nodes to be placed in critical positions of the communication path. But the question remains: “How to know if a given node can be trusted?”. In this paper we present a survey of a new research area which goal is to exploit trust in social links to solve some of the shortcomings of anonymous communication systems. Recent research shows that by using social networking features it is possible to prevent traffic analysis attacks and even detect Sybil attacks.