Crowds (anonymity network)

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Crowds is a proposed anonymity network for anonymous web browsing. The main idea behind Crowds anonymity protocol is to hide each user's communications by routing them randomly within a group of similar users. Neither the collaborating group members nor the end receiver can therefore be sure where in the group the packet originated. Crowds was designed by Michael K. Reiter and Aviel D. Rubin. It defends against internal attackers and a corrupt receiver, but provides no anonymity against a global attacker or a local eavesdropper (see "Crowds: Anonymity For Web Transactions"). Crowds is vulnerable to the predecessor attack; this was discussed in Reiter and Rubin's paper and further expanded in "The Predecessor Attack: An Analysis of a Threat to Anonymous Communications Systems" by Matthew K. Wright, Micah Adler, And Brian Neil Levine. Crowds introduced the concept of users blending into a crowd of computers.^[1]