A Covert-Aware Anonymous Communication Network for Social Communication

To effectively protect the communication content and communication behavior of social networks, anonymous communication technologies are widely used. However, the anonymous communication networks represented by Tor and I2P lack the covertness of the control plane design, which leads to important user behavioral characteristics in the process of accessing anonymous communication networks. Therefore, network monitors can analyze users' communication behavior by tracking these characteristics. In this paper, the concept of covert measurement is proposed. On this basis, a software-defined anonymous communication network architecture is presented, which also considers the covertness of the anonymous communication network control plane and the data plane. According to the theoretical analysis and experimental results, the anonymous communication network architecture proposed in this paper has better anonymity and usability than traditional anonymous communication networks, such as Tor.