Experimental evaluation of anonymous protocols under the JXTA middleware

Abstract

JXTA is a peer-to-peer (P2P) middleware which has undergone successive iterations through its 10 years of history, slowly incorporating a security baseline that may cater to different applications and services. However, in order to appeal to a broader set of secure scenarios, it would be interesting to take into consideration more advanced capabilities, such as anonymity. There are several proposals on anonymous protocols that can be applied in the context of a P2P network, but it is necessary to be able to choose the right one given each application¿s needs. In this paper, we provide an experimental evaluation of two relevant protocols, each one belonging to a different category of approaches to anonymity: unimessage and split message. We base our analysis on two scenarios, with stable and non-stable peers, and three metrics: round trip-time (RTT), node processing time and reliability.