An Efficient Overlay Infrastructure for Privacy-preserving Communication on the Internet

This paper presents Mist2 (Mist 2nd generation), an overlay infrastructure for privacy-preserving communication. Nodes are arranged in concentric rings, which reduce average overlay hop latencies. Mist2 builds on the strengths of previous work on Mist, and significantly improves on the communication overhead, resilience to router failures, and the distributed nature of the algorithm. Mist2 provides sender, receiver, and sender-receiver anonymity for communicating end users. Compared to previous approaches, Mist2 significantly improves the communication efficiency in latency without sacrificing the level of anonymity. This paper proposes an enhancement to the original Mist, and improves this solution using rings resulting in Mist2. The simulation results clearly demonstrate the improved performance of anonymous communication in Mist2 compared to relevant systems, while maintaining anonymity. Since the proposed ring-based approach optimizes path latencies, it performs better than the other proposed solutions where the overlay hops can potentially traverse large distances.