What is an anonymizing service?
An anonymizing service is an application or a whole communications architecture that disguises communication relationships between senders and receivers in the internet so that the sender and / or receiver remain anonymous and outside observers are not able to assign the intercepted contents to the senders and receivers. The simplest anonymizing services are so-called proxy servers which pass on an internet request to the server respectively for the user. At this basic state of anonymity, however, the communication is not anonymous as far as the provider and the operators of the proxy server are concerned. More suitable are real anonymizing architectures such as a mix network that makes a re-identification of the communication very difficult by the encoded transmission of messages between the mix stations.
