Abstract
Adversaries use many nefarious techniques to stay hidden and anonymous during their online activities. But there are still loopholes in the identity hiding services that can be exploited at a granular level to deanonymize the user. The Internet has gone through significant advancement in the last few decades. This technology change provides useful data and information via websites and blogs, but it gives add-on services that help users while on a route. For the last few years, such third-party services were continuously grabbing and capturing our personal information for their own benefits, such as advertisement or providing more recommendations without the consent of users. Furthermore, there is a possibility of sharing data with traders of the black market, where personal information such as mail, phone, or physical address can be sold and used for illegal access to various systems. Such information may also be used for any atrocious act. Many anonymous services are rendered over the Internet to provide low-level anonymity and privacy to communicated data. However, those services still have flaws that can be easily exploited. Such systems are susceptible to various attacks, including exploiting hardware devices, traffic analysis, footprinting, and many more. Proxy servers that help alter IP addresses and location details are also receptive in nature to collect data by authorities. Virtual private network (VPN), which uses the same features as proxy servers, adds an extra encryption layer. This functionality makes VPN a more secure technology compared to proxy servers. Though it has security, VPN has another serious issue of untrustworthy of VPN servers located around the globe. These VPN servers can collect users data, or they can be used as network security monitoring (NSM) media. This chapter focuses on anonymous systems like Invisible Internet Project (I2P), Freenet, and JonDonym, services that hide the user identity from the surface Internet. It also includes an introduction to The Onion Router (TOR) without going into details. Moreover, the chapter demonstrates the configure of each system and its crucial elements to make the users identity safe from different nemesis.
