Preserving receiver´s anonymity for circular structured P2P networks

Some unique attributes of P2P networks such as cost efficiency and scalability, contributed for the widespread adaptation of these networks. Since P2P applications are mostly used in file-sharing, preserving anonymity of users has become a very important subject for researchers. As a result, a lot of methods are suggested for P2P networks to preserve anonymity of users. Most of these methods, by relying on established anonymous solutions on client/server applications, are presented for unstructured P2P networks. But structured overlays, by using Distributed Hash Tables (DHT) for their routing, do not resemble traditional paradigms. Therefore, current anonymous methods can not be implemented for them easily. In this paper, we introduce a novel methodology to provide receiver´s anonymity for circular P2P structures. With this method, we get help from inherited features of network infrastructure to establish a standard way for making tunnels. Our purpose is to introduce a flexible design which is able to manage different parts of the tunnels on current infrastructures. For this purpose, we implement our method on top of Chord to show how such design can be managed for real world applications. The results of applied method on a chord-like network shows that by managing critical features of our method, a trade-off can be made between stronger security and performance of the network.