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MorphMix - a peer to peer based system for anonymous Internet access

Contrary to popular belief, using the Internet is not anonymous at all. Since the Internet is a packet-switching network, every IP packet must carry the IP addresses of both communication endpoints. Consequently, anyone capable of observing at least one packet of a communication relationship can tell who is communicating with whom. The problem with this lack of anonymity is that it limits the privacy protection of Internet users. Today, privacy issues in the Internet are usually addressed by legislations that require operators of servers to clearly state their privacy practices and by encrypting the application data exchanged between two communicating parties. In general, privacy practices are difficult to enforce and encrypting the application data does not hide the IP addresses in the IP packets. However, learning the endpoints of communications relationships often reveals a lot of information about individual Internet users’ preferences, habits, and problems; for instance when accessing web sites that provide medical information, religious sites, or the web site of a credit institution. These privacy issues can only be solved by enabling anonymous Internet communication. In this thesis, we work on the problem of achieving anonymous Internet access for low-latency applications such as web browsing. With anonymous Internet access, we mean that a client can connect to and communicate with a server such that the server does not learn the client’s IP address and an attacker interested in learning who is communicating with whom cannot find out the IP addresses of both client and server. Unlike encryption, anonymity cannot be “produced” by the communication endpoints themselves, but must be provided by a third party infrastructure. The concept of mix networks is widely considered to be the most promising approach for such an infrastructure, and consequently, we focus on mix networks in these thesis. The main contribution of our work is MorphMix, which fulfils the princi-