A3: An Extensible Platform for Application-Aware Anonymity

This paper presents the design and implementation of Application-Aware Anonymity (A3), an extensible platform for deploying anonymity-based services on the Internet. A3 allows applications to tailor their anonymity properties and performance characteristics according to specific communication requirements. To support flexible path construction, A3 exposes a declarative language (A3LOG) that enables applications to compactly specify path selection and instantiation policies executed by a declarative networking engine. We demonstrate that our declarative language is sufficiently expressive to encode novel multi-metric performance constraints as well as existing relay selection algorithms employed by Tor and other anonymity systems, using only a few lines of concise code. We experimentally evaluate the A3 system using a combination of tracedriven simulations and deployment on PlanetLab. Our experimental results demonstrate that A3 can flexibly support a wide range of path selection and instantiation strategies at low performance overhead. Disciplines Computer Sciences Comments Sherr, M., Mao, A., Marczak, W., Zhou, W., Loo, B., & Blaze, M., A3: An Extensible Platform for ApplicationAware Anonymity, Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, 2010, doi: isoc/conferences Author(s) Micah Sherr, Andrew Mao, William R. Marczak, Wenchao Zhou, Boon Thau Loo, and Matthew A. Blaze This conference paper is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/cis_papers/701 A3: An Extensible Platform for Application-Aware Anonymity Micah Sherr∗ Andrew Mao† William R. Marczak‡ Wenchao Zhou∗ Boon Thau Loo∗ Matt Blaze∗ ∗University of Pennsylvania †Harvard University ‡University of California, Berkeley {msherr,wenchaoz,boonloo,blaze}@cis.upenn.edu, [email protected], [email protected]