MDA: Multiple Decentralized Anchors for Hiding Communication Information

This paper presents a novel network architecture based on The Onion Routing (TOR) network and BitTorrent concepts to advance privacy and anonymity in communication networks. In the traditional TOR network, when the transmitter sends a message, any external intruder or the first proxy knows that a message has been sent from a specific location or IP address. The same issue is on the receiver side. This can reveal some privacy about who using the network, the time of activity, and the density of communications. Another issue with the services that provide end-to-end encryption is that the powerful entities can force the service's owner to deliver their encryption keys and other related data that can reveal information about the communications within the network. Therefore, the new architecture decentralizes the network entirely in which nodes are the only fundamental component of the network. The nodes themselves act as hops and control the rules of the network by using a distributed hash table (DHT). There are no proxy servers working as hops in TOR networks or servers to hold DHTs as trackers in the BitTorrent network. The nodes act as an end client and a hop server for other nodes that want to join, leave, and communicate. The actual implementation of the MDA network is under development for peer-to-peer (P2P) messaging. Further development can be made for web browsing, file sharing and video streaming.