A Framework for Analyzing Anonymous Network Topology

Nowadays, Internet privacy becomes more and more important and sensitive, and has been one of the latest buzz words to hit the Internet world. In response to protect the privacy of Internet users, a variety of privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) have emerged. As one of privacy enhancing technologies, anonymous communication has been extensively studied from various aspects by researchers. Node churn is frequent in anonymous network, which make it difficult to maintain a stable network topology, therefore it is necessary to get more insight into the overall anonymous network topology. In this work, in order to better grasp the present situation of research, we investigate existing organizations and universities which study anonymous communication from the perspective of network topology, and related projects. Then we survey related papers to anonymous communication published in recent years, which focus on the analysis of node selection (especially in the Tor). In addition, we present a framework of anonymous communication network topology, and a visual illustration of this analysis that shows the progression of the research of network topology and node discovery in anonymous communication. Finally, some related problems and follow-up study are presented to be studied deeply in future.