Anonymous but Traceable IP Address-Based Communication System

Protection of users´ privacy in communications has recently attracted a great deal of attention as Internet services have advanced. Unfortunately, the current IP architecture cannot protect a user´s privacy in the network layer (i. e., IP layer) because the IP address identifies the user´s node, and the same address is used as long as the node is active. Simply making IP addresses anonymous would make it difficult for a network administrator to trace a node. In this paper, we describe a communication architecture that enables anonymity to be maintained in the network layer without making nodes untraceable. The main idea behind our architecture is to take advantage of the collisions in hash-based algorithms to seal the node identifier in randomly generated addresses. We also describe a system based on our proposed architecture.