 |
CLIQUENET |
Despite the critical role anonymous and private communication plays in
the offline world, the state of user privacy in the online world is
grim. Current Internet networking protocols provide no support for
masking the identity of communication endpoints. An adversary with
access to router nodes can monitor traffic patterns and harvest IP
addresses. Tracking software, such as Carnivore/Echelon, can be used
to map IP addresses back to individual users. While encryption
schemes, like SSL, can make it computationally difficult for attackers
to decipher what was sent, they cannot hide who sent it. The situation
is particularly problematic when governments and corporations engage
in online monitoring and censorship, as the current set of digital
communication protocols enable user tracking at an unprecedented
scale.
CliqueNet is a peer-to-peer, self-organizing, scalable
communication protocol that guarantees anonymity. It has three
critical properties:
- it unconditionally hides the identity of the
source and destination of a packet, even from attackers with arbitrary
wiretapping capabilities,
- it scales well with increasing numbers
of hosts, and
- it is resilient against malicious and disruptive participants.
The central
abstraction provided by CliqueNet is that of an anonymous
communication channel that supports a completely anonymous broadcast
operation, as well as a sender-anonymous, efficient unicast
primitive. This anonymous dial tone is akin to an Ethernet carrier,
and supports traditional internetworking protocols such as TCP. In
short, CliqueNet is a practical, scalable, and robust protocol, which
can serve as a modular communication substrate for peer-to-peer
applications that require strong anonymity and privacy guarantees.
CliqueNet has evolved into Herbivore. Please see the Herbivore pages for the current status
of the project.
CliqueNet FAQ