Anonymous communications for JXTA peer-to-peer services: A multi-protocol approach

Abstract

JXTA is an open peer-to-peer (P2P) protocols specification that, in its about 10 years of history, has slowly evolved to appeal to a broad set of applications. As part of this process, some long awaited security improvements have been included in the latest versions, providing basic message privacy and authentication. However, under some contexts, more advanced security requirements should be met, such as anonymity. Even though several approaches exist to deploy anonymity in P2P networks, no perfect solution exists that is able to cater to every possible scenario. In this work, we propose how to adapt JXTA messaging to allow services to be anonymously accessed in a manner that is completely invisible to the existing protocols, taking advantage of JXTA’s idiosyncrasies and capabilities,. To achieve this end, we propose a multi-protocol anonymous layer, so the most suitable one can be chosen depending on the scenario.