Anonymous Short Communications over Social Networks

Social networks nowadays attract a huge number of people and are an extraordinary platform for applications going beyond the basic mission of connecting people. In this context, anonymity of senders and recipients of messages could play an important role to protect privacy in specific cases such as proximity-based services, surveys, crowdfunding, and e-democracy, in which only short communications should be protected. As the social network provider could be semi-trusted (i.e., honest-but-curious), it could play as global passive adversary, monitoring the flow of all the messages exchanged in the social network. In this paper, we propose a new anonymous communication protocol tailored to our application context. We show that our proposal offers a good solution to the trade-off between traffic overhead and communication latency, better than the application of existing anonymous overlay routing protocols.