TY - JOUR
T1 - An overview of anonymity technology usage
AU - Li, Bingdong
AU - Erdin, Esra
AU - Gunes, Mehmet Hadi
AU - Bebis, George
AU - Shipley, Todd
PY - 2013/7/1
Y1 - 2013/7/1
N2 - Anonymity technologies enable Internet users to maintain a level of privacy that prevents the collection of identifying information such as the IP address. Understanding the deployment of anonymity technologies on the Internet is important to analyze the current and future trends. In this paper, we provide a tutorial survey and a measurement study to understand the anonymity technology usage on the Internet from multiple perspectives and platforms. First, we review currently utilized anonymity technologies and assess their usage levels. For this, we cover deployed contemporary anonymity technologies including proxy servers, remailers, JAP, I2P, and Tor with the geo-location of deployed servers. Among these systems, proxy servers, Tor and I2P are actively used, while remailers and JAP have minimal usage. Then, we analyze application-level protocol usage and anonymity technology usage with different applications. For this, we preform a measurement study by collecting data from a Tor exit node, a P2P client, a large campus network, a departmental email server, and publicly available data on spam sources to assess the utilization of anonymizer technologies from various perspectives. Our results confirm previous findings regarding application usage and server geo-location distribution where certain countries utilize anonymity networks significantly more than others. Moreover, our application analysis reveals that Tor and proxy servers are used more than other anonymity techniques.
AB - Anonymity technologies enable Internet users to maintain a level of privacy that prevents the collection of identifying information such as the IP address. Understanding the deployment of anonymity technologies on the Internet is important to analyze the current and future trends. In this paper, we provide a tutorial survey and a measurement study to understand the anonymity technology usage on the Internet from multiple perspectives and platforms. First, we review currently utilized anonymity technologies and assess their usage levels. For this, we cover deployed contemporary anonymity technologies including proxy servers, remailers, JAP, I2P, and Tor with the geo-location of deployed servers. Among these systems, proxy servers, Tor and I2P are actively used, while remailers and JAP have minimal usage. Then, we analyze application-level protocol usage and anonymity technology usage with different applications. For this, we preform a measurement study by collecting data from a Tor exit node, a P2P client, a large campus network, a departmental email server, and publicly available data on spam sources to assess the utilization of anonymizer technologies from various perspectives. Our results confirm previous findings regarding application usage and server geo-location distribution where certain countries utilize anonymity networks significantly more than others. Moreover, our application analysis reveals that Tor and proxy servers are used more than other anonymity techniques.
KW - Anonymity
KW - I2P
KW - Measurement
KW - Proxy
KW - Tor
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84879842425&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84879842425&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.comcom.2013.04.009
DO - 10.1016/j.comcom.2013.04.009
M3 - Review article
AN - SCOPUS:84879842425
SN - 0140-3664
VL - 36
SP - 1269
EP - 1283
JO - Computer Communications
JF - Computer Communications
IS - 12
ER -