An agent-based model of anonymous communication protocols

So far various anonymous communication protocols have been proposed independently and aimed at different situations. As a result, it is hard to understand the essential structures of those protocols and each protocol must be evaluated and implemented independently. To solve these problems, we propose an anonymous communication model that can represent a wide variety of anonymous protocols. In our model, we introduce agents that work in cooperation to realize anonymous communication. This modeling is based on the observation that most of practical anonymous protocols have much commonality in that they have several relay nodes en route from the sender to the receiver to provide anonymity. On our model, such agents' behaviors are expressed in a small set of primitive functions. Using these primitive functions, the essential structures of anonymous communication protocols can be described clearly