Cebolla: Pragmatic IP Anonymity

Zach A Brown

Cebolla is a daemon that can be used to build an overlay network that provides secure IP tunnels which can be configured to provide endpoint anonymity.

There has been much work in academia on anonymizing 'mix' networks that are built atop the public internet. Most have been built with a strong emphasis on theory, but are lacking in what the authors felt were basic requirements of quality free software.

Cebolla was built to be simple, secure, reliable, and anything but surprising. It assumes a threat model that addresses common concerns while not going so far as to require the implementation properties that have rendered previous technology infeasible to deploy on the public network.

The paper will discuss the threat model, Cebolla's implementation that addresses it, and the software methodology that was used in creating it.