The goal of this project is to develop the Application Aware Anonymity (A3) infrastructure, a flexible, secure, and low-overhead infrastructure for deploying anonymity-based services on the Internet. A3 allows applications to tailor their anonymity properties and performance characteristics according to their specific requirements. A3 employs a novel path selection scheme that allows hosts to discover routes with specific anonymity and network properties. Declarative networking is used as an extensible framework for users to specify their routes using a declarative interface. A3 utilizes network coordinate systems that map nodes to n-dimensional coordinates such that the distance between coordinates corresponds to network metrics such as latency and bandwidth between the nodes. To secure its network coordinate systems, A3 utilizes Veracity, a fully decentralized vote-based service that does not require a priori shared secrets or trusted nodes to verify network coordinates. The intellectual merit of this project is the integration of concepts from networking, security, and distributed data management. The broader impact of this program is the development of an extensible routing infrastructure that enables the rapid development, deployment, and testing of anonymous source-routing protocols and applications. A3 will be disseminated as open-source, and deployed as a PlanetLab service with a declarative API to enable security and networking researchers to rapidly develop, deploy, and experiment with different anonymous routing strategies. Potential applications of this infrastructure include the anonymization of next-generation Internet services including voice-over-IP, video-on-demand, video teleconferencing, and live audio and video streaming.
