Anonymity in P2P systems

In the last years, the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) applications to share and exchange knowledge among people around the world has experienced an exponential growth. Therefore, it is understandable that, like in any successful communication mechanism used by a lot of humans being, the anonymity can be a desirable characteristic in this scenario. Anonymity in P2P networks can be obtained by means of different methods, although the most significant ones are broadcast protocols, dining-cryptographer (DC) nets and multiple-hop paths. Each of these methods can be tunable in order to build a real anonymity P2P application. In addition, there is a mathematical tool called entropy that can be used in some scenarios to quantify anonymity in communication networks. In some cases, it can be calculated analytically but in others it is necessary to use simulation to obtain the network entropy. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.