Towards an analysis of source-rewriting anonymous systems in a lossy environment

Abstract

Anonymity that protects the identity of participants is a basic requirement for many network-based applications. For practical anonymous communication systems, strong anonymity, reliability and efficiency are three critical properties, but they may degrade in a lossy environment (nodes failure or links crash). This paper takes Crowds system as an example and statistically analyzes the degradation of these properties in lossy environment. Theoretical deduction and numerical analysis illustrate that Crowds is reliable enough to tolerate nodes failure, but both efficiency and anonymity will degrade. With the theoretical analysis results in this paper, a Crowds system operator can adjust the parameter pf to be tolerant of different node failure rate and node corruption rate.