Dynamic Multilayer Routing to Achieve Location-Hiding

Abstract

Overlay networks are used as proxies which mediate communication between an application and its users with-out revealing the application’s location (IP address). The capability that users can communicate with an application without knowing its location is called location-hiding. Al-though recent years have provided little literature about location-hiding such as Tor or anonymous web publishing, most Internet activities where anonymity is desired require only sender and relationship anonymity, thereby location-hiding needs more academic effort. This paper proposes a novel architecture to achieve location-hiding. We describe the design of a dynamic multilayer routing (DMR) where users can communicate withan application without knowing any information about its location (its IP address). The essential factors of DMR protocol are multi-layering, reconfiguration and host-diversity. The goal of DMR is to overcome or reduce several draw-backs of static structure based techniques. Through analytical analysis, this paper provides a de-tailed study of DMR architecture and shows that DMR is completely strong against penetration attacks. Our analysis shows that attackers have a negligible chance (e.g., 10−8)to penetrate the architecture and disclose the application’slocation.