Network Coding-Based Mutual Anonymity Communication Protocol for Mobile P2P Networks

To protect user privacy in mobile peer to peer (MP2P) networks, a network coding-based mutual anonymity communication protocol (NMA) is proposed. Our contributions are described as below. We first design a network coding scheme which can defend against various omniscient adversary attacks. Then a novel anonymous communication protocol is presented to meet the anonymity requirement for MP2P applications. The novel anonymous communication protocol is comprised of three steps: query issuance, reply-confirm and file delivery. They all employ the network coding scheme to split and encrypt the signaling and data information. The splitted fragments are flooded at a certain number of hops until some intermediate peers called agents, can collect enough fragments to recover the original information. Next, the agents forward the messages to their neighboring peers. For the query issuance, the neighboring peers forward the query message to the responders by random walk mechanism. For the rest steps, the data information is delivered along the reversed paths discovered by the way of onion routing plus buffer information in routing table. In the entire process, the identities and sensitive information about the initiator and responder are completely hidden. The advantages of the scheme lie in the fact that the network coding and mutli-agent can improve the load balance, the successful rate of information transmission and anonymity degree. The experimental results demonstrate that when the percentage of malicious peers is lower than 50%, the various performances of the NMA, including the response time and the success rate, outperform other mutual anonymity schemes.