A generic P2P architecture for anonymous services

Peer-to-peer systems exhibit, due to their decentralized structure, interesting anonymity properties and are therefore often used as a supporting service for anonymous applications. Unfortunately, there is currently no overall framework that captures the various peer-to-peer models and their specific features to guide the development of anonymous applications. This paper presents a generic and flexible architecture for peer-to-peer systems that separates applications and supporting services. The architecture is structured in different layers and each layer comprises a set of generic and reusable building blocks. To demonstrate the power of the architecture, we have implemented an anonymous chat application on top of the architecture.