Abstract

this article's publication, the prototype network is processing more than 1 million Web connections per month from more than six thousand IP addresses in twenty countries and in all six main top level domains. [7] Onion Routing operates by dynamically building anonymous connections within a network of real-time Chaum Mixes [3]. A Mix is a store and forward device that accepts a number of fixed-length messages from numerous sources, performs cryptographic transformations on the messages, and then forwards the messages to the next destination in a random order. A single Mix makes tracking of a particular message either by specific bit-pattern, size, or ordering with respect to other messages difficult. By routing through numerous Mixes in the network, determining who is talking to whom becomes even more difficult. Onion Routing's network of core onion-routers (Mixes) is distributed, faulttolerant, and under the control of multiple administrative domains, so no single onion-router can bring down the network or compromise a user's privacy, and cooperation between compromised onion-routers is thereby confounded.

Citations