Herbivore: A Scalable and Efficient Protocol for Anonymous Communication

Abstract

Anonymity is increasingly important for networked applications amidst concerns over censorship and privacy. In this paper, we describe Herbivore, a peer-to-peer, scalable, tamper-resilient communication system that provides provable anonymity and privacy. Building on dining cryptographer networks, Herbivore scales by partitioning the network into anonymizing cliques. Adversaries able to monitor all network traffic cannot deduce the identity of a sender or receiver beyond an anonymizing clique. In addition to strong anonymity, Herbivore simultaneously provides high efficiency and scalability, distinguishing it from other anonymous communication protocols. Performance measurements from a prototype implementation show that the system can achieve high bandwidths and low latencies when deployed over the Internet.