Eluding carnivores: file sharing with strong anonymity

Anonymity is increasingly important for networked applications amidst concerns over censorship and privacy. This paper outlines the design of HerbivoreFS, a scalable and efficient file sharing system that provides strong anonymity. HerbivoreFS provides computational guarantees that even adversaries able to monitor all network traffic cannot deduce the identity of a sender or receiver beyond an anonymizing clique of k peers. HerbivoreFS achieves scalability by partitioning the global network into smaller anonymizing cliques. Measurements on PlanetLab indicate that the system achieves high anonymous bandwidth when deployed on the Internet.