Aqua - a high bandwidth anonymity system that resists traffic analysis

[coderman]

this seemed to get lost in the hubub over the summer,

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http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/?id=199302

Towards Efficient Traffic-analysis Resistant Anonymity Networks

Stevens LeBlond, David Choffnes, Wenxuan Zhou, Peter Druschel, Hitesh
Ballani, and Paul Francis
August 2013

Existing IP anonymity systems tend to sacrifice one of low latency,
high bandwidth, or resistance to traffic-analysis. High-latency
mix-nets like Mixminion batch messages to resist traffic-analysis at
the expense of low latency. Onion routing schemes like Tor deliver low
latency and high bandwidth, but are not designed to withstand traffic
analysis. Designs based on DC-nets or broadcast channels resist
traffic analysis and provide low latency, but are limited to low
bandwidth communication.

In this paper, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation
of Aqua, a high bandwidth anonymity system that resists traffic
analysis. We focus on providing strong anonymity for BitTorrent, and
evaluate the performance of Aqua using traces from hundreds of
thousands of actual Bit-Torrent users. We show that Aqua achieves
latency low enough for efficient bulk TCP flows, bandwidth sufficient
to carry BitTorrent traffic with reasonable efficiency, and resistance
to traffic analysis within anonymity sets of hundreds of clients. We
conclude that Aqua represents an interesting new point in the space of
anonymity network designs.