The cost of becoming anonymous: on the participant payload in Crowds uri icon

abstract

  • Crowds is a recently proposed protocol for anonymous communication, which is based on the idea of "blending into a crowd". Thus, each participant of the crowd gets the benefits of anonymity but also serves as a proxy for other participants. An important measure of the protocol is the participant payload in the system, which is measured by the amount of work a participant needs to pay on serving as a proxy for any communication requested by the participants in the system. In this paper, we derive a precise formula for the participant payload in Crowds, which improves the previous results. Moreover, our result shows the first time that the participant payload in Crowds is entirely independent of the size of the crowd. In consequence, Crowds protocol has a very nice scalability property. 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

published proceedings

  • Information Processing Letters

author list (cited authors)

  • Sui, H., Wang, J., Chen, J., & Chen, S.

citation count

  • 1

complete list of authors

  • Sui, Hongfei||Wang, Jianxin||Chen, Jianer||Chen, Songqiao

publication date

  • April 2004