GAS: Overloading a File Sharing Network as an Anonymizing System

Anonymity is considered as a valuable property as far as everyday transactions in the Internet are concerned. Users care about their privacy and they seek for new ways to keep secret as much as of their personal information from third parties. Anonymizing systems exist nowadays that provide users with the technology, which is able to hide their origin when they use applications such as the World Wide Web or Instant Messaging. However, all these systems are vulnerable to a number of attacks and some of them may collapse under a low strength adversary. In this paper we explore anonymity from a different perspective. Instead of building a new anonymizing system, we try to overload an existing file sharing system, Gnutella, and use it for a different purpose. We develop a technique that transforms Gnutella as an Anonymizing System (GAS) for a single download from the World Wide Web.