Degradation of Anonymous Protocols

Brian Neil Levine
UMass Amherst

April 25, 2003
11 a.m. - 12 noon
Fuller Labs 320

Abstract

With widespread acceptance of the Internet as a public medium for communication and information retrieval, there has been rising concern that the personal privacy of users can be eroded by cooperating network entities. A technical solution to maintaining privacy is to provide anonymity.

There have been a number of protocols proposed for anonymous network communication. We show there exist attacks that degrade the anonymity of all existing protocols. We use this result to place an upper bound on how long existing protocols, including Crowds, Onion Routing, Hordes, and DC-Net, can maintain anonymity in the face of the attacks described. This provides a analytical measure by which the protocols can be compared. Additionally we show how violating an assumption of the attack allows malicious users to setup other participants to falsely appear to be the initiator of a connection.

Host

Mark Claypool

Refreshments will be served in FL 320 beginning at 10:50 a.m.

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Last modified: Sep 27, 2006, 16:05 EDT