8,729 research outputs found
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
TARANET: Traffic-Analysis Resistant Anonymity at the NETwork layer
Modern low-latency anonymity systems, no matter whether constructed as an
overlay or implemented at the network layer, offer limited security guarantees
against traffic analysis. On the other hand, high-latency anonymity systems
offer strong security guarantees at the cost of computational overhead and long
delays, which are excessive for interactive applications. We propose TARANET,
an anonymity system that implements protection against traffic analysis at the
network layer, and limits the incurred latency and overhead. In TARANET's setup
phase, traffic analysis is thwarted by mixing. In the data transmission phase,
end hosts and ASes coordinate to shape traffic into constant-rate transmission
using packet splitting. Our prototype implementation shows that TARANET can
forward anonymous traffic at over 50~Gbps using commodity hardware
Dovetail: Stronger Anonymity in Next-Generation Internet Routing
Current low-latency anonymity systems use complex overlay networks to conceal
a user's IP address, introducing significant latency and network efficiency
penalties compared to normal Internet usage. Rather than obfuscating network
identity through higher level protocols, we propose a more direct solution: a
routing protocol that allows communication without exposing network identity,
providing a strong foundation for Internet privacy, while allowing identity to
be defined in those higher level protocols where it adds value.
Given current research initiatives advocating "clean slate" Internet designs,
an opportunity exists to design an internetwork layer routing protocol that
decouples identity from network location and thereby simplifies the anonymity
problem. Recently, Hsiao et al. proposed such a protocol (LAP), but it does not
protect the user against a local eavesdropper or an untrusted ISP, which will
not be acceptable for many users. Thus, we propose Dovetail, a next-generation
Internet routing protocol that provides anonymity against an active attacker
located at any single point within the network, including the user's ISP. A
major design challenge is to provide this protection without including an
application-layer proxy in data transmission. We address this challenge in path
construction by using a matchmaker node (an end host) to overlap two path
segments at a dovetail node (a router). The dovetail then trims away part of
the path so that data transmission bypasses the matchmaker. Additional design
features include the choice of many different paths through the network and the
joining of path segments without requiring a trusted third party. We develop a
systematic mechanism to measure the topological anonymity of our designs, and
we demonstrate the privacy and efficiency of our proposal by simulation, using
a model of the complete Internet at the AS-level
Distributed Performance Measurement and Usability Assessment of the Tor Anonymization Network
While the Internet increasingly permeates everyday life of individuals around
the world, it becomes crucial to prevent unauthorized collection and abuse of
personalized information. Internet anonymization software such as Tor is an
important instrument to protect online privacy. However, due to the
performance overhead caused by Tor, many Internet users refrain from using it.
This causes a negative impact on the overall privacy provided by Tor, since it
depends on the size of the user community and availability of shared
resources. Detailed measurements about the performance of Tor are crucial for
solving this issue. This paper presents comparative experiments on Tor latency
and throughput for surfing to 500 popular websites from several locations
around the world during the period of 28 days. Furthermore, we compare these
measurements to critical latency thresholds gathered from web usability
research, including our own user studies. Our results indicate that without
massive future optimizations of Tor performance, it is unlikely that a larger
part of Internet users would adopt it for everyday usage. This leads to fewer
resources available to the Tor community than theoretically possible, and
increases the exposure of privacy-concerned individuals. Furthermore, this
could lead to an adoption barrier of similar privacy-enhancing technologies
for a Future Internet. View Full-Tex
Peer to Peer Information Retrieval: An Overview
Peer-to-peer technology is widely used for file sharing. In the past decade a number of prototype peer-to-peer information retrieval systems have been developed. Unfortunately, none of these have seen widespread real- world adoption and thus, in contrast with file sharing, information retrieval is still dominated by centralised solutions. In this paper we provide an overview of the key challenges for peer-to-peer information retrieval and the work done so far. We want to stimulate and inspire further research to overcome these challenges. This will open the door to the development and large-scale deployment of real-world peer-to-peer information retrieval systems that rival existing centralised client-server solutions in terms of scalability, performance, user satisfaction and freedom
Hang With Your Buddies to Resist Intersection Attacks
Some anonymity schemes might in principle protect users from pervasive
network surveillance - but only if all messages are independent and unlinkable.
Users in practice often need pseudonymity - sending messages intentionally
linkable to each other but not to the sender - but pseudonymity in dynamic
networks exposes users to intersection attacks. We present Buddies, the first
systematic design for intersection attack resistance in practical anonymity
systems. Buddies groups users dynamically into buddy sets, controlling message
transmission to make buddies within a set behaviorally indistinguishable under
traffic analysis. To manage the inevitable tradeoffs between anonymity
guarantees and communication responsiveness, Buddies enables users to select
independent attack mitigation policies for each pseudonym. Using trace-based
simulations and a working prototype, we find that Buddies can guarantee
non-trivial anonymity set sizes in realistic chat/microblogging scenarios, for
both short-lived and long-lived pseudonyms.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figure
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