Anonymous Web transactions with Crowds

Abstract

The article presents a system called Crowds that enables the retrieval of information over the Web without revealing so much potentially private information to several parties. The goal of Crowds is to make browsing anonymous, so that information about either the user or what information he or she retrieves is hidden from Web servers and other parties. It prevents a Web server from learning any potentially identifying information about the user, including even the user's Internet protocol address or domain name. Crowds also prevents Web servers from learning a variety of other information, such as the page that referred the user to its site or the user's computing platform. Crowds provides users with the ability to retrieve Web content anonymously. It offers strong anonymity properties that are well suited for Web transactions and does so in the face of a broader range of adversaries than proxy-based anonymizers do. It provides complementary protections when the party of concern can directly monitor messages from the user's machine.