Anonymizing Masses: Practical Light-weight Anonymity at the Network Level

Abstract: In an era of pervasive online surveillance, Internet users are in need of better anonymity solutions for online communications without sacrificing performance. Existing overlay anonymity tools, such as the Tor network, suffer from performance limitations and recent proposals to embed anonymity into Internet protocols face fundamental deployment challenges. In this paper, we introduce Practical Anonymity at the NEtwork Level (PANEL), a practical light-weight anonymity solution based on hardware switching. We implement a prototype of PANEL on a high-performance hardware switch (namely, Barefoot Tofino) using P4 network programming language, and examine the validity and performance of the prototype. Based on our empirical results, PANEL achieves 96% of the actual throughput of the switch and adds a low-latency overhead (e.g., 3% overhead in Skype calls), while offering partial deployablility and transparency (i.e., PANEL requires neither client-side nor server-side modifications).