Garbled Routing (GR): A generic framework towards unification of anonymous communication systems

Anonymous Communication Systems conceal the identity of the communicating parties to preserve their privacy. Various approaches exist, yet none is taking advantage of the diversity of the available solutions to offer a higher anonymity. We introduce a generic framework, a high level host architecture, that allows the mixture of various communication protocols. Our proposal relies on plugin components to offer generic message processing, and on dynamic routing schemes to offer a generic circuit establishment. The results include a potentially higher anonymity for all the networks deployed within the framework, and a pathway towards sharing user-bases and code-bases, mixing the low- and high-latency communication, and benefiting from security-by-obscurity. Blending various protocols also achieves some level of network unobservability. This paper presents the design of the generic framework, the path to its adoption, the model of two real-world systems, the analysis of various security aspects, and the experimental results.