AnonShard: A Peer-to-Peer Network for Anonymous and Decentralized Computation

In today’s digital era, privacy has become an increasingly rare and valuable resource. With the rapid expansion of data collection practices, individuals’ personal information has become a highly sought-after resource, often traded in legal and illegal markets. Motivated by a commitment to privacy and cybersecurity, this thesis presents AnonShard, a decentralized peer-to-peer system prototype designed to execute computational tasks in an anonymous environment. The system aims to provide the foundation for building an anonymous computing infrastructure, expanding into a broader vision of a privacy and innovation based ecosystem. The research explores the principles of anonymity, the motivations behind anonymous computing, and the technical challenges associated with building such a system. The thesis details the system’s design, architecture, implementation choices, and the trade-offs made during development due to time constraints and complexity. Additionally, evaluations and scalability tests are conducted with a secondary prototype used to analyze the Tor network’s behavior. This work aims to deliver a functional and flexible prototype that can be the foundation for developing a privacy-preserving computing ecosystem. At the end of the thesis, the implementation of a reward system, the introduction of different node typologies, and other features aimed at incentivizing participation and enhancing the sustainability of the system are discussed.