Onion routing

not only hiding the content of messages, but also hiding who is talking to whom (traffic analysis). Much like a physical envelope, the simple application of cryptography within a packet-switched network hides the contents of messages being sent, but can reveal who is talking to whom, and how often. Onion Routing is a general-purpose infrastructure for private communication over a public network It provides anonymous connections that are strongly resistant to both eavesdropping and traffic analysis. The connections are bidirec-tional, near real-time, and can be used for both connection-based and connectionless traffic.