Mutual anonymous overlay multicast

Multicast services are demanded by a variety of applications. Many applications require anonymity during their communication. However, there has been very little work on anonymous multicasting and such services are not available yet. Due to the fundamental differences between multicast and unicast, the solutions proposed for anonymity in unicast communications cannot be directly applied to multicast applications. In this paper we define the anonymous multicast system, and propose a mutual anonymous multicast (MAM) protocol including the design of a unicast mutual anonymity protocol and construction and optimization of an anonymous multicast tree. MAM is self-organizing and completely distributed. We define the attack model in an anonymous multicast system and analyze the anonymity degree. We also evaluate the performance of MAM by comprehensive simulations. © 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.