Slicing the Onion: Anonymous Routing Without PKI

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed many proposals for anonymous routing in overlay peer-to-peer networks. The proposed protocols either expose the receiver and the message content, or require the overlay nodes to have public-private key pairs with the public keys known to everyone. In practice, however, key distribution and management are well-known difficultproblems and have crippled any widespread deployment of anonymous routing. This paper uses a combination of information slicing and source routing to provide anonymous communication in a way similar to Onion Routing but without a public key infrastructure (PKI).