Towards Application-Aware Anonymous Routing

This paper investigates the problem of designing anonymity networks that meet application-specific performance and security constraints. We argue that existing anonymity networks take a narrow view of performance by considering only the strength of the offered anonymity. However, real-world applications impose a myriad of communication requirements, including end-to-end bandwidth and latency, trustworthiness of intermediary routers, and network jitter. We pose a grand challenge for anonymity: the development of a network architecture that enables applications to customize routes that tradeoff between anonymity and performance. Towards this challenge, we present the Application-Aware Anonymity (A) routing service. We envision that A will serve as a powerful and flexible anonymous communications layer that will spur the future development of