Purpose: Anonymous remailers can be used to hide information about the sender of email by re-sending the email through a series of nodes that are connected in a chain thus hiding the originating location. The aim of remailers is to protect the anonymity of people who may find themselves in…
Purpose: Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) and GNU Privacy Guard (GPG) are both public key encryption cryptographic software used to authenticate the identity of people sending messages and to encrypt and decrypt email messages and documents. The key difference between the two is that PGP is paid-license software owned by Symantec….
Purpose: Off-the-Record Messaging (OTR) is an encryption protocol making it possible to engage in private conversations using specific instant messaging software. Its aim is to provide a platform that enables both encrypted and ‘deniable’ instant messaging conversations [CPU02]. ‘Deniable authentication’ allows participants in an instant messaging conversation to verify each…
Purpose: New types of encryption software are being developed that aim to address the vulnerabilities associated with traditional forms of encryption such as Public Key Encryption. At issue with traditional methods are traceability of authorship through the use of digital signatures (no true anonymity) and the decryption of messages and…
Purpose: There are options for preserving privacy and security that do not rely upon cryptographic technologies. Rather some people choose a selection of workarounds for communicating sensitive information. Techniques The most well known techniques include: Pseudonyms – a fictitious name used in place of a person’s real name to mask…
Purpose: A Virtual Private Network (VPN) network provides secure access to online data by creating a private network with which to access both the public Internet and other internal organisational networks. A VPN uses tunneling protocols thus encrypted data at the sending end and decrypted at the receiving end. VPNs…
Purpose: The Invisible Internet Project (I2P) is an anonymous peer-to-peer communication layer, an offshoot of Freenet (GIZ01) designed to run any Internet service (email, IRC, file sharing, HTTP, Telnet) as well as distributed applications. Its aim is to “protect communication from dragnet surveillance and monitoring by third parties such as…
Purpose: Tor is software that directs Internet traffic through a network of relay servers in order to conceal the source and destination of the traffic. It allows for the anonymous sharing of information over the Internet, and can be used to circumvent Internet censorship (TOR01). Tor also enables the creation…
Purpose: Freenet is a peer-to-peer platform designed to enable the anonymous publishing and retrieval of information, in order to counter the censorship of information on the Internet (FRE01). Freenet is not a proxy for accessing the Internet anonymously; it allows access only to content that has been inserted into the…
