VOUTE-Virtual Overlays Using Tree Embeddings
This addresses privacy and security issues in communication networks for users needing anonymity, though it is incremental as it builds on existing greedy embeddings.
The paper tackles the problem of low performance and vulnerability to attacks in privacy-preserving friend-to-friend overlays by introducing a routing scheme based on anonymous return addresses instead of identifying coordinates, resulting in high scalability, plausible deniability, and effective mitigation of failures and denial-of-service attacks in simulations.
Friend-to-friend (F2F) overlays, which restrict direct communication to mutually trusted parties, are a promising substrate for privacy-preserving communication due to their inherent membership-concealment and Sybil-resistance. Yet, existing F2F overlays suffer from a low performance, are vulnerable to denial-of-service attacks, or fail to provide anonymity. In particular, greedy embeddings allow highly efficient communication in arbitrary connectivity-restricted overlays but require communicating parties to reveal their identity. In this paper, we present a privacy-preserving routing scheme for greedy embeddings based on anonymous return addresses rather than identifying node coordinates. We prove that the presented algorithm are highly scalalbe, with regard to the complexity of both the routing and the stabilization protocols. Furthermore, we show that the return addresses provide plausible deniability for both sender and receiver. We further enhance the routing's resilience by using multiple embeddings and propose a method for efficient content addressing. Our simulation study on real-world data indicates that our approach is highly efficient and effectively mitigates failures as well as powerful denial-of-service attacks.