ANON: an IP-layer anonymizing infrastructure

This paper demonstrates an IP-layer anonymizing infrastructure, called ANON, which allows server addresses to be hidden from clients and vice versa. In providing address anonymity, ANON uses a network resident set of IP-layer anonymizing forwarders that can forward IP packets with nested encryption and decryption applied to their source and destination addresses. To prevent adversaries from compromising the anonymity by learning the forwarding path, ANON incorporates a suite of countermeasures, including link padding and non-malleable, semantically secure link encryption. To prevent denial of service (DoS) attacks through the anonymizing infrastructure itself ANON uses rate limiting. Finally, to increase the resilience against attacks and infrastructure failures, ANON uses redundant forwarders with anycast addresses and a fault-tolerant overlay network to connect forwarders.