Anonymity in Structured Peer-to-Peer Networks - Ph.D. Qualifying Exam Proposal

Introduction As more of our daily activities are carried out over the Internet, there is an increased concern about preserving privacy online. With storage costs declining following Moore's Law, the capability to perform large scale collection of data and the subsequent tracking of individual action is no longer restricted to well-funded government agencies such as the FBI, but is now accessible to corporations and even individuals well-situated within a network. And while there are ongoing legal developments intended to prevent privacy abuses, a technological solution raising the cost of such data collections will go a long way to safeguarding the privacy of our online life. Anonymizing systems are one such technology. They foil attempts to track users' activities by dissociating the identities of the users from their actions. Anonymity has been a subject of research for quite some time; there have been a number of proposed anonymizing systems [Cha81, RR98, Dai96], several of whic