Lightweb: Private web browsing without all the baggage

Abstract

This paper proposes lightweb, a new system for private browsing. A lightweb client can browse a web of textbased pages without revealing to anyone—not the network, not the servers hosting the pages—which pages it is reading. Unlike Tor and other anonymizing web proxies, which are inherently vulnerable to traffic-analysis attacks, lightweb’s design protects against traffic-analysis attacks by design. While lightweb is expensive in relative terms (hundreds of core-seconds of server computation per page load), we show with microbenchmarks that the total system cost can be inexpensive in absolute terms (comparable to the cost of a Netflix membership). This paper does not present a polished system, but instead aims to spark discussion on radical approaches to a privacy-first web.