Port-Based Anonymous Communication Network: An Efficient and Secure Anonymous Communication Network

Abstract

With the rise of the internet, there has been an increasing focus on user anonymity. Anonymous communication networks (ACNs) aim to protect the identity privacy of users in the network. As a typical ACN, Tor achieves user anonymity by relaying user data through a series of relay nodes. However, this results in higher latency due to the transmission of network traffic between multiple nodes. This paper proposes a port-based anonymous communication network (PBACN) to address this issue. First, we propose a path construction algorithm. This algorithm describes constructing paths by partitioning the communication path information, which can reduce the probability of being discovered by adversaries. Secondly, we design a port-based source routing addressing method. During data transmission from the source to the destination, each node can directly forward the data by resolving the address into the port of each node. This method eliminates the need for table lookups, reducing the complexity of routing. Lastly, we propose an entropy-based metric to measure the anonymity of different ACNs. In terms of experimental evaluation, we quantitatively analyze the anonymity and end-to-end delay of various ACNs. The experimental results show that our proposed method reduces end-to-end delay by approximately 25% compared to Tor. When the adversary fraction is 20%, PBACN can improve the anonymity degree by approximately 4%.