Cashmere: resilient anonymous routing

Anonymous communication protects user communication from identification by third-party observers. Existing anonymous routing layers utilize Chaum-Mixes for anonymity, by relaying traffic through relay nodes called MIXes. The source defines a static forwarding path through which traffic is relayed to the destination. The resulting path is fragile and shortlived: failure of one MIX in the path breaks the forwarding path and results in data loss and jitter before a new path is constructed. In this paper, we propose Cashmere, a resilient anonymous routing layer built on a structured peer-to-peer overlay. Instead of single-node MIXes, Cashmere selects regions in the overlay namespace as MIXes. Any node in a region can act as the MIX, drastically reducing the probability of a MIX failure.

Anonymous routing is extremely useful as a building block for higher level applications, both for anonymous applications and as a security mechanism for general networked systems. In addition to the basic routing protocol, we are building additional anonymous communication primitives and higher level applications.

Cashmere: Resilient Anonymous Routing