Proceedings of Informing Science & IT Education Conference (InSITE) 2014 Cite as: Grahn, K. J., Forss, T., & Pulkkis, G. (2014). Anonymous communication on the internet. Proceedings of In- forming Science & IT Education Conference (InSITE) 2014 (pp. 103-120). Retrieved from http://Proceedings.InformingScience.org/InSITE2014/InSITE14p103-120Grahn0483.pdf Anonymous Communication on the Internet Kaj J. Grahn, Thomas Forss, and Göran Pulkkis Arcada University of Applied Sciences, Helsinki, Finland
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Abstract There are many kinds of systems developed for anonymous communication on the internet. We survey a number of systems and evaluate their security. Among these systems we compare func- tionalities like Onion Routing, anonymous VPN services, probabilistic anonymity, and determin- istic anonymity. Other types of anonymous communication such as messaging, peer-to-peer communication, web use, emailing, and use of other Internet applications are also presented. We follow up by presenting different types of attacks with the purpose of identifying anonymously communicating users. These attacks fall into the following categories: internal/external attacks, passive/active attacks, and static/adaptive attacks. We describe the following attacks as well as known protections against these attacks: predecessor attacks, intersection attacks, timing attacks, and Sybil attacks. Lastly we discuss design choices, operation, and security of the current TOR network – The 2G Onion Router. Access