Design and Implementation of an Anonymous Communication System Manageable by a Signle Entity

Abstract

The necessity for keeping a destination address and sending source information secret is pointed out from the viewpoint of protection of personal information with the widespread use of E-mail systems. Such address information, however, is necessary to route messages through networks, and communication with addresses kept secret is hard to implement. We propose a new design of anonymous communication system which keeps sender-receiver-pair secret from the communication system itself. Since our system does not necessarily need separate managing entities to keep the anonymity, it can be a cost effective solution. Reply block mechanism to reply to an anonymous sender is also efficiently implemented, which make the system useful in a wide variety of applications including consultations on the personal affairs. This paper reports the principle of anonymous communication, its prototype system, the efficiency of it, and the evaluation result.