A Novel Provably Secure Anonymous Communication (PSAC) Scheme

Abstract

Anonymity is increasingly important for network communications concerning about censorship and privacy. Early research on source anonymous communication protocols generally stems from mixnet and DC-net. They either cannot provide provable anonymity or suffer from transmission collision. To solve this problem, a k-anonymous protocol based on hierarchical ring structure and mix technique was proposed. This proposed protocol is collision free and provides provable k-anonymity for both the sender and the recipient. However, this protocol requires the trustworthiness of k honest nodes, therefore, anonymity is only conditional. Alternatively, in this paper, we propose a provably secure anonymous communication (PSAC) scheme without relying on any trusted third parties. While ensuring the message sender anonymity, it can also provide message content authenticity. The proposed PSAC scheme can prevent tracing the senders of messages and limits the disruption that can be caused by participants.