Internet anonymity with mobility - key challenges for the future.

Privacy, including the privacy of correspondence (communications), is a human right. Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) provide a number of tools with the aim to protect this right. Anonymity networks, such as Tor, contribute to privacy by providing a degree of anonymity for an individual's Internet traffic. An increase in mobile devices connecting to the Internet is predicted to surpass static connections by 2014. The desire for privacy will provide additional challenges in the future, for anonymity networks, in supporting an increasing mobile client base. An experiment was set up, to simulate a mobile device accessing the Tor network while roaming across different wireless networks. The preliminary results show that the impact on performance for the mobile client (and potentially the overall Tor network) is significant, due to the frequency of hand-offs and subsequent break in the secured connection to the Tor network. Performance is critical in maintaining a large and diverse anonymity set, therefore the impact of an increasing mobile client base, must be fully understood.