Anonymous Internet

Abstract

Throughout the years the Internet became of indispensable value to social, economic and political life. Despite this, the Internet in all its forms and protocols has proven to be extremely sensitive to manipulation by forces in control of the infrastructure of the Internet. Along with the growth of The Internet came the growth of censorship and filtering by governments. Governmental forces across the world have filtered, blocked and eavesdropped network traffic for both economic and political reasons. This thesis focuses on the question of how filtering techniques and data censorship introduced by overseeing (governmental) forces can be circumvented. The challenge is to offer a fully autonomous and anonymized network of interconnected users with high-quality experience. Along with this research, software has been implemented which enables the buildup of a file sharing network, where data is hard to trace and downloaders are indistinguishable from other users of the network. It forms the basis for a future anonymous network. This thesis and the developed software are a proof-of-concept which can and will be further developed by the Tribler team at the Delft University of Technology. This thesis introduces the `p2p onion router', an anonymized network where high bandwidth can be achieved. This makes it more attractive than alternatives such as TOR for multimedia streaming. A new cryptographic approach based on the existing counter mode is introduced. This enables packet loss and packet reordering in stream ciphers, in order to utilize the benefits of BitTorrent traffic in onion routing.