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A Tool for Privacy on the Internet

Using Internet services nowadays means leaving digital traces. More and more companies try to use these traces to create individual profiles of Internet users. We help people to protect their E-Privacy: The JAP software provides anonymous and unobservable communication on the Internet. Upon this basis any privacy related Internet service could be built. Just imagine drug-related advisory services or medical information services. Even in the field of E-Commerce anonymity plays an important role. Most people are not happy receiving Spam E-Mail as a result of their Internet activities. Other examples are Online-voting or political chat rooms.

Web Surfing without Traces

We offer an easy to use Open-Source software for everybody: JAP helps to protect your privacy and covers all digital traffic. Most existing systems for anonymous communication reduce the security to achieve higher performance. Our final system provides strong anonymity; i.e. the system withstands so-called traffic analysis. That means, even an adversary who could eavesdrop any Internet communication or link will not get any information about who is communicating with whom.

Our System: JAP

The system consists of a client software (called JAP) and a chain of several intermediate servers.

Here are the two most common scenarios for using JAP:

1. JAP helps to protect your personal privacy. JAP can be installed on the user's computer to protect his or her Internet activities. This is very useful for private Internet usage.
2. JAP helps to protect your organization. JAP can also be installed on a dedicated machine, for example on a proxy or firewall. JAP now serves as a privacy gateway for the entire company, and there is no need to install software on the user's workstation. This might be very useful for companies in order to hide their transactions and/or research activities on the Internet against observation by competitors or against other spying activities.

How it works

JAP acts as a local proxy between the browser and the insecure Internet. All requests for web pages are handled by JAP and are encrypted several times. The encrypted messages are sent through a chain of intermediate servers (named Mixes by the inventor of the theoretical background, David Chaum) to the final destination on the Internet.

Multiple layers of encryption protect all messages. A Mix collects messages in a batch, totally changes their appearance (removes one layer of encryption) and forwards them all at the same time, but in a different order. An adversary may observe all communication links, however he cannot determine a relation between incoming and outgoing packets. A surfer remains anonymous within the group of all users of the service.

Demonstrably, the system protects your privacy as long as the Mix works correctly. Unfortunately nobody knows whether a certain Mix is actually trustworthy or not. Therefore we use a whole chain of Mixes. Each message passes through several Mixes and the entire chain of Mixes has to be corrupt to successfully observe the user's activities. The chaining effectively prevents single Mixes from observing. This is the meaning of strong anonymity: Even the anonymity service itself cannot spy on its users.

Privacy policy:

• This homepage does not use cookies,
• it does not use user tracking techniques,
• it only produces normal logfiles to help managing the page.

Download JAP

Attention! JAP is available for free and already protects your privacy against most observers, like your ISP, your network operator or your boss. However, this version does NOT yet achieve the full security or anonymity that we strive for. It does not protect you against an adversary who observes all communication links on the Internet.

Please select your system:

• Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP
• Apple Macintosh
• OS/2
• Others (Unix/Linux)

If you want to get information about new versions of JAP and other important changes, please subscribe to our mailing lists.

Help and FAQ

Online help and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Developer pages

Information about joining the developer group is available on our developer pages. You will find the newest source codes of JAP, Mixes and InfoService, you can submit bug reports and join mailing lists / discussion groups.

Feedback

Do you have suggestions, like to submit a bug report or ask for help? Send an E-Mail to: jap@inf.tu-dresden.de If you want to protect your E-Mail from eavesdropping, use our pgp key. Finger print: B965 99E4 05EB 4202 895C 27DC D022 60C9 73EE 1DD1

Maintenance times

We apologise for the inconvenience caused because we cannot guarantee our service (mixes, Infoservice, Website, Download, ...) is failsafe:

• Because JAP is a research projecet it is advanced permanently. Nevertheless we try to offer a stabil download version all the time and to keep the service available all the time, except for the following maintenance hours:
  • Monday, 14:00 - 16:00
  • Wednesday, 14:00 - 16:00
  That is Central European Time (MET). Subtract 6 hours (or 7 during the Summer) to get EST (Eastern Standard Time).
• At the moment web server, mixes and InfoService are run by universities or other public utilities and are free of charge for the user (although a lot of data traffic is produced). Unfortunately sometimes power supply or data network are switched off for maintenance or fail. We try to inform you about planned maintenance on this web site in the column 'News' but in the case of fail we are powerless.

The challenge

We are looking for partners–ISPs, IT security companies, networking companies, privacy commissioners–who are willing to operate a Mix and would like to support the idea of providing a world wide anonymity service. We are open to partners who want to discuss commercialization of our service.

The client program (JAP) is running on the Java platform. JAP works on all major platforms, for instance Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Solaris etc. The Mix-servers are written in C++ and work on many different platforms including Windows NT, Linux, Solaris, Irix and other Unix-like operating systems.

JAP and Mixes are Open-Source software. Everyone may inspect it and make sure, that the software provides the expected functionality and does not have hidden trapdoors.

Contact information

University of Technology Dresden
Institute for System Architecture
Dr. Hannes Federrath
D-01062 Dresden, Germany

E-Mail: jap@inf.tu-dresden.de

WWW: http://anon.inf.tu-dresden.de/

JAP is a software development within the Project Anonymity in the Internet sponsored by the German Research Foundation and the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology.

Current Version: 00.01.037 From Friday 08/23, 3 p.m. to Monday 08/26, 10 a.m. (MET) our service is not available because the power supply at Dresden University is switched off for maintenance. New Dataprotection Tool CookieCooker scrambles cookies and manages your web accounts. (26. Februar 2002) Dataprotection in Internet Explorer 6.0!Dataprotection-Configurationfile to download - prevents profiling by Cookies. (19th November 2001) UPDATE! Here's an Update (version 00.01.037) of JAP that fixes the POST-bug. (30th October 2001) Command Line JAP! The development pages explain how to use the mix-software as a proxy. Think of it as a command line version of JAP.

 

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