Blindspot: Indistinguishable Anonymous Communications

Communication anonymity is a key requirement for individuals under targeted surveillance. Practical anonymous communications also require indistinguishability - an adversary should be unable to distinguish between anonymised and non-anonymised traffic for a given user. We propose Blindspot, a design for high-latency anonymous communications that offers indistinguishability and unobservability under a (qualified) global active adversary. Blindspot creates anonymous routes between sender-receiver pairs by subliminally encoding messages within the pre-existing communication behaviour of users within a social network. Specifically, the organic image sharing behaviour of users. Thus channel bandwidth depends on the intensity of image sharing behaviour of users along a route. A major challenge we successfully overcome is that routing must be accomplished in the face of significant restrictions - channel bandwidth is stochastic. We show that conventional social network routing strategies do not work. To solve this problem, we propose a novel routing algorithm. We evaluate Blindspot using a real-world dataset. We find that it delivers reasonable results for applications requiring low-volume unobservable communication.Comment: 13 Page

Message anonymity on predictable opportunistic networks

A Predictable Opportunistic Network (POppNet) is a network where end-to-end connectivity is not guaranteed, and node communication happens in an opportunistic manner, but the behavior of the network can be predicted in advance. The predictability of such networks can be exploited to simplify some mechanisms of more generic OppNets where there is no prior knowledge on the network behavior. In this paper, we propose some solutions to provide anonymity for messages on POppNets by using simple onion routing, and thus to increase the privacy of the nodes in communication

Toward Anonymity in Delay Tolerant Networks: Threshold Pivot Scheme

Proceedings of the Military Communications Conference (MILCOM 2010), San Jose, CA, October 2010.Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) remove traditional assumptions of end-to-end connectivity, extending network communication to intermittently connected mobile, ad-hoc, and vehicular environments. This work considers anonymity as a vital security primitive for viable military and civilian DTNs. DTNs present new and unique anonymity challenges since we must protect physical location information as mobile nodes with limited topology knowledge naturally mix. We develop a novel Threshold Pivot Scheme (TPS) for DTNs to address these challenges and provide resistance to traffic analysis, source anonymity, and sender-receiver unlinkability. Reply techniques adapted from mix-nets allow for anonymous DTN communication, while secret sharing provides a configurable level of anonymity that enables a balance between security and efficiency. We evaluate TPS via simulation on real-world DTN scenarios to understand its feasibility, performance, and overhead while comparing the provided anonymity against an analytically optimal model

Improve the Onion Routing Performance and Security with Cryptographic Algorithms

Onion Routing and Cryptographic Algorithms are two essential components of online privacy and secure data transmission. Onion Routing is a technique used to protect internet users' anonymity by routing their communication through a network of servers, while Cryptographic Algorithms are used to encrypt and decrypt data to ensure its confidentiality. As technology advances, there is a need to consider the development of new cryptographic algorithms for TOR to ensure its continued effectiveness. The combination of Onion Routing and Cryptographic Algorithms has proven to be an effective way to protect online privacy and security. This paper aims to explore the benefits of combining Onion Routing and Cryptographic Algorithms and to propose a hybrid symmetric and hashing algorithm technique to transmit data securely. By the end of this paper, researchers will have a comprehensive understanding of the Onion Routing and Cryptographic Algorithms, their implementation in TOR, and the limitations and risks associated with using such tools

Onion routing in deterministic delay tolerant networks

Aquest volum de Lecture notes in computer science, amb el títol Foundations and Practice of Security, recull les actes al 8th International Symposium on Foundations & Practice of Security que va tenir lloc a Clermont-Ferrand (France), del 16 al 28 d'octubre de 2015Deterministic DTNs are networks where the behavior is known in advance or where a repetitive action occurs over time like in public transportation networks. This work proposes the application of an onion routing approach to deterministic DTNs to achieve anonymous communications. We show how the prior stage of path selection in onion routing can be achieved using the information provided by deterministic networks

The Quest for a Killer App for Opportunistic and Delay Tolerant Networks (Invited Paper)

Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) has attracted a lot of attention from the research community in recent years. Much work have been done regarding network architectures and algorithms for routing and forwarding in such networks. At the same time as many show enthusiasm for this exciting new research area there are also many sceptics, who question the usefulness of research in this area. In the past, we have seen other research areas become over-hyped and later die out as there was no killer app for them that made them useful in real scenarios. Real deployments of DTN systems have so far mostly been limited to a few niche scenarios, where they have been done as proof-of-concept field tests in research projects. In this paper, we embark upon a quest to find out what characterizes a potential killer applications for DTNs. Are there applications and situations where DTNs provide services that could not be achieved otherwise, or have potential to do it in a better way than other techniques? Further, we highlight some of the main challenges that needs to be solved to realize these applications and make DTNs a part of the mainstream network landscape