ANONYMOUS CONNECTIONS and ONION ROUTING

Human rights workers, activists, and spies, among other groups and even ordinary citizens, may desire the ability to communicate via the Internet without revealing who they are or what they're doing. This can be accomplished through the user of anonymous network protocols, whose goals are to provide anonymity to the network user. Onion routing is a distributed P2P application that allows two peers to communicate anonymously over the network. The main focus is to have a practical network application allowing two users to have anonymous communication and at the same time be resistant to many network security attacks like denial of service attack, man in the middle attack, replay attack etc. Onion Routing is one such application which enables users to have anonymous communication and yet is so reliable from eavesdroppers and traffic analyzers. The communications in general are bi-directional and real time. It first securely establishes the connection. To ensure the security well known networking and public key cryptographic techniques are utilized. Here the identities of the sender and the receiver are kept hidden by an onion structure, which is cryptographically layered data structure that defines the route through the onion routing network. After the route is established by making the entries into the routing table, the data is transmitted over the channel, which is also repeatedly encrypted. Once the data is transferred the connection is destroyed. Using symmetric and asymmetric cryptosystems at different levels enhances further security. Keywords— Onion routing, Crowds, Onion Proxy, dns_server, Onion, RSA, Dijkstra.