Pisces: Anonymous Communication Using Social Networks

The architectures of deployed anonymity systems such as Tor suffer from two key problems that limit user’s trust in these systems. First, paths for anonymous communication are built without considering trust relationships between users and relays in the system. Second, the network architecture relies on a set of centralized servers. In this paper, we propose Pisces, a decentralized protocol for anonymous communications that leverages users’ social links to build circuits for onion routing. We argue that such an approach greatly improves the system’s resilience to attackers. A fundamental challenge in this setting is the design of a secure process to discover peers for use in a user’s circuit. All existing solutions for secure peer discovery leverage structured topologies and cannot be applied to unstructured social network topologies. In Pisces, we discover peers by using random walks in the social network graph with a bias away from highly connected nodes to prevent a few nodes from dominating the circuit creation process. To secure the random walks, we leverage the reciprocal neighbor policy: if malicious nodes try to exclude honest nodes during peer discovery so as to improve the chance of being selected, then honest nodes can use a tit-fortat approach and reciprocally exclude the malicious nodes from their routing tables. We describe a fully decentralized protocol for enforcing this policy, and use it to build the Pisces anonymity system. Using theoretical modeling and experiments on real-world social network topologies, we show that (a) the reciprocal neighbor policy mitigates active attacks that an adversary can perform, (b) our decentralized protocol to enforce this policy is secure and has low overhead, and (c) the overall anonymity provided by our system significantly outperforms existing approaches.