Anonymous Communication in Peer-to-Peer Networks for providing more Privacy and Security

—One of the most important issues in peer-to-peer networks is anonymity. The major anonymity for peer-to-peer users concerned with the users' identities and actions which can be revealed by any other members. There are many approaches proposed to provide anonymous peer-to-peer communications. An intruder can get information about the content of the data, the sender's and receiver's identities. Anonymous approaches are designed with the following three goals: to protect the identity of provider, to protect the identity of requester and to protect the contents of transferred data between them. This article presents a new peer-to-peer approach to achieve anonymity between a requester and a provider in peer-to-peer networks with trusted servers called suppernode so that the provider will not be able to identify the requester and no other peers can identify the two communicating parties with certainty. This article shows that the proposed algorithm improved reliability and has more security. This algorithm, based on onion routing and randomization, protects transferring data against traffic analysis attack. The ultimate goal of this anonymous communications algorithm is to allow a requester to communicate with a provider in such a manner that nobody can determine the requester's identity and the content of transferred data. I. INTRODUCTION A peer-to-peer network is a dynamic and scalable set of computers (also referred as peers). The peers can join or leave the network at any time. [1] The basic idea of a peer-to-peer network is to build a virtual layer over the application or network layer. In such an overlay network all peers interconnect with each other. All peers are both the resource consumers and providers. Currently, file-sharing is the most popular application in peer-to-peer systems [2]. Peer-to-peer networks can be divided into structured and unstructured classes. Structured peer-to-peer networks map each peer as well as the index information of each resource into a globally position such as Distributed Hash Table (DHT) in a highly organized structure. This paradigm has two main drawbacks which limit the implementation in real world. First, it cannot support the fuzzy query and Second, the DHT structure has large overhead to individual peers and too difficult to maintenance. In Unstructured peer-to-peer networks, peers can join and leave networks simply and there are not any structured