Private Routing in the Internet

Despite the breakthroughs in end-to-end encryption that keeps the content of Internet data confidential, the fact that packet headers contain source and IP addresses remains a strong violation of users’ privacy. This paper describes a routing mechanism that allows for connections to be established where no provider, including the final destination, knows who is connecting to whom. The system makes use of inter-domain source routing with public key cryptography to establish connections and simple private symmetric encryption in the data path that allows for fully stateless packet transmission. We discuss the potential implications of real deployment of our routing mechanism in the Internet.