Crowds - How Crowds Works

How Crowds Works

1. Each user joins a crowd of other users by registering himself at the blender which is a single server responsible for membership management. When a user registers, all the other members in the crowd are notified. The blender is also responsible for key distribution, as it distributes symmetric keys to individual pairs of jondos, used for encryption and decryption, respectively of packets routed along the virtual paths.
2. Each user is represented by a jondo on her machine which is an application that runs on a user’s computer.
3. Each jondo either submit request to end server or forwards it to a randomly chosen jondo (possibly itself). Other jondo tasks are to strip out any personal information such as cookies, identifying header fields.
4. A jondo cannot tell if a request is initiated by the previous jondo or one before it.
5. Request and reply follow the same virtual paths which are constructed using an algorithm involving probabilities.The virtual paths are torn down and reconstructed on a regular basis to allow anonymity for newly added members.