Anonymizing Masses: Practical Light-weight Anonymity at the Network Level
This addresses the need for better anonymity solutions for Internet users without sacrificing performance, though it is incremental as it builds on existing network-level approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of online surveillance by introducing PANEL, a practical light-weight anonymity solution based on hardware switching, which achieves 96% of the switch's throughput and adds only 3% latency overhead in Skype calls.
In an era of pervasive online surveillance, Internet users are in need of better anonymity solutions for online communications without sacrificing performance. Existing overlay anonymity tools, such as the Tor network, suffer from performance limitations and recent proposals to embed anonymity into Internet protocols face fundamental deployment challenges. In this paper, we introduce Practical Anonymity at the NEtwork Level (PANEL), a practical light-weight anonymity solution based on hardware switching. We implement a prototype of PANEL on a high-performance hardware switch (namely, Barefoot Tofino) using P4 network programming language, and examine the validity and performance of the prototype. Based on our empirical results, PANEL achieves 96% of the actual throughput of the switch and adds a low-latency overhead (e.g., 3% overhead in Skype calls), while offering partial deployablility and transparency (i.e., PANEL requires neither client-side nor server-side modifications).