Abstract
What does it mean to be anonymous in network communications? Our central thesis is that both the theoretical literature and the deployed systems have gotten the answer essentially wrong. The answers have been wrong because they apply the wrong metric to the wrong adversary model. I indicate problems in the established adversary models and metrics for anonymity as well as implications for the design and analysis of anonymous communication systems.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Acquisti, A., Dingledine, R., Syverson, P.: On the Economics of Anonymity. In: Wright, R.N. (ed.) FC 2003. LNCS, vol. 2742, pp. 84–102. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
The Anonymizer (2009), http://www.anonymizer.com/ ; Homepage of the company that offers the Anonymizer Proxy Service. Original Anonymizer first described in [5]
Berthold, O., Federrath, H., Köpsell, S.: Web MIXes: A System for Anonymous and Unobservable Internet Access. In: Federrath, H. (ed.) Anonymity 2000. LNCS, vol. 2009, pp. 115–129. Springer, Heidelberg (2001)
Borisov, N., Danezis, G., Mittal, P., Tabriz, P.: Denial of service or denial of security? How attacks on reliability can compromise anonymity. In: De Capitani di Vimercati, S., Syverson, P., Evans, D. (eds.) CCS 2007: Proceedings of the 14th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, pp. 92–102. ACM Press (2007)
Chaum, D.: Untraceable electronic mail, return addresses, and digital pseudonyms. Communications of the ACM 4(2), 84–88 (1981)
Chaum, D.: Untraceable electronic mail, return addresses, and digital pseudonyms. Communications of the ACM 4(2), 84–88 (1981)
Clauß, S., Schiffner, S.: Structuring anonymity networks. In: Goto, A. (ed.) DIM 2006: Proceedings of the 2006 ACM Workshop on Digital Identity Management, Alexandria, VA, USA, pp. 55–62. ACM Press (2006)
Danezis, G., Clayton, R.: Route fingerprinting in anonymous communications. In: Sixth IEEE International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing, P2P 2006, pp. 69–72. IEEE Computer Society Press (2006)
Danezis, G., Dingledine, R., Mathewson, N.: Mixminion: Design of a type III anonymous remailer protocol. In: Proceedings of the 2003 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, Berkeley, CA, pp. 2–15. IEEE Computer Society (May 2003)
Danezis, G., Serjantov, A.: Statistical Disclosure or Intersection Attacks on Anonymity Systems. In: Fridrich, J. (ed.) IH 2004. LNCS, vol. 3200, pp. 293–308. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Danezis, G., Syverson, P.: Bridging and Fingerprinting: Epistemic Attacks on Route Selection. In: Borisov, N., Goldberg, I. (eds.) PETS 2008. LNCS, vol. 5134, pp. 151–166. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Danezis, G., Wittneben, B.: The economics of mass surveillance and the questionable value of anonymous communications. In: Anderson, R. (ed.) Fifth Workshop on the Economics of Information Security, WEIS 2006 (June 2006)
Dingledine, R., Mathewson, N.: Anonymity loves company: Usability and the network effect. In: Anderson, R. (ed.) Fifth Workshop on the Economics of Information Security, WEIS 2006 (June 2006)
Dingledine, R., Mathewson, N., Syverson, P.: Tor: The second-generation onion router. In: Proceedings of the 13th USENIX Security Symposium, pp. 303–319. USENIX Association (August 2004)
Dingledine, R., Mathewson, N., Syverson, P.: Deploying low-latency anonymity: Design challenges and social factors. IEEE Security & Privacy 5(5), 83–87 (2007)
Dingledine, R., Syverson, P.: Synchronous Batching: From Cascades to Free Routes. In: Martin, D., Serjantov, A. (eds.) PET 2004. LNCS, vol. 3424, pp. 186–206. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Dolev, D., Yao, A.C.: On the security of public-key protocols. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 2(29), 198–208 (1983)
Evans, N.S., Dingledine, R., Grothoff, C.: A practical congestion attack on Tor using long paths. In: Proceedings of the 18th USENIX Security Symposium, Montreal, Canada, pp. 33–50. USENIX Association (August 2009)
Goldschlag, D.M., Reed, M.G., Syverson, P.F.: Hiding Routing Information. In: Anderson, R. (ed.) IH 1996. LNCS, vol. 1174, pp. 137–150. Springer, Heidelberg (1996)
Goldschlag, D.M., Stubblebine, S.G., Syverson, P.F.: Temporarily hidden bit commitment and lottery applications. International Journal of Information Security 9(1), 33–50 (2010)
Helmers, S.: A brief history of anon.penet.fi - the legendary anonymous remailer. CMC Magazine (September 1997)
Hintz, A.: Fingerprinting Websites Using Traffic Analysis. In: Dingledine, R., Syverson, P. (eds.) PET 2002. LNCS, vol. 2482, pp. 171–178. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Hopper, N., Vasserman, E.Y., Chan-Tin, E.: How much anonymity does network latency leak? In: De Capitani di Vimercati, S., Syverson, P., Evans, D. (eds.) CCS 2007: Proceedings of the 14th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, pp. 82–91. ACM Press (2007); Expanded and revised version in [24]
Johnson, A., Syverson, P., Dingledine, R., Mathewson, N.: Trustbased anonymous communication: Adversary models and routing algorithms. In: CCS 2011: Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, ACM Press (October 2011)
Johnson, A., Syverson, P.: More anonymous onion routing through trust. In: 22nd IEEE Computer Security Foundations Symposium, CSF 2009, Port Jefferson, New York, USA, pp. 3–12. IEEE Computer Society (July 2009)
Johnson, A., Syverson, P., Dingledine, R., Mathewson, N.: Trust-based anonymous communication: Adversary models and routing algorithms. In: CCS 2011: Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security. ACM Press (October 2011)
JonDonym – the internet anonymisation service (2008), https://www.jondos.de/en/ ; Commercial version of the Java Anon Proxy (JAP). Initially published description in [3]
Liberatore, M., Levine, B.N.: Inferring the source of encrypted HTTP connections. In: Wright, R.N., De Capitani di Vimercati, S., Shmatikov, V. (eds.) CCS 2006: Proceedings of the 13th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, pp. 255–263. ACM Press (2006)
Mathewson, N., Dingledine, R.: Practical Traffic Analysis: Extending and Resisting Statistical Disclosure. In: Martin, D., Serjantov, A. (eds.) PET 2004. LNCS, vol. 3424, pp. 17–34. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Möller, U., Cottrell, L., Palfrader, P., Sassaman, L.: Mixmaster protocol - version 3. IETF Internet Draft (2003)
Murdoch, S.J.: Hot or not: Revealing hidden services by their clock skew. In: Wright, R.N., De Capitani di Vimercati, S., Shmatikov, V. (eds.) CCS 2006: Proceedings of the 13th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, pp. 27–36. ACM Press (2006)
Murdoch, S.J., Danezis, G.: Low-cost traffic analysis of Tor. In: Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, IEEE S&P 2005, pp. 183–195. IEEE CS (May 2005)
Ostrovsky, R., Yung, M.: How to withstand mobile virus attacks. In: Proceedings of the Tenth ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, PODC 1991, pp. 51–59. ACM Press (1991)
Øverlier, L., Syverson, P.: Locating hidden servers. In: Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, S&P 2006, pp. 100–114. IEEE CS (May 2006)
Parekh, S.: Prospects for remailers: where is anonymity heading on the internet? First Monday 1(2) (August 5, 1996), http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2/remailers/
Serjantov, A., Dingledine, R., Syverson, P.: From a Trickle to a Flood: Active Attacks on Several Mix Types. In: Petitcolas, F.A.P. (ed.) IH 2002. LNCS, vol. 2578, pp. 36–52. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Pfitzmann, A., Köhntopp, M.: A terminology for talking about privacy by data minimization: Anonymity, unlinkability, undetectability, unobservability, pseudonymity, and identity management, version v0.32 (December 2009), http://dud.inf.tu-dresden.de/Anon_Terminology.shtml , Regularly revised and updated version of [36]
Reed, M.G., Syverson, P.F., Goldschlag, D.M.: Anonymous connections and onion routing. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications 16(4), 482–494 (1998)
Serjantov, A., Dingledine, R., Syverson, P.: From a Trickle to a Flood: Active Attacks on Several Mix Types. In: Petitcolas, F.A.P. (ed.) IH 2002. LNCS, vol. 2578, pp. 36–52. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Simmons, G.J.: The history of subliminal channels. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications 16(4), 452–462 (1998)
Syverson, P., Reed, M., Goldschlag, D.: Onion Routing access configurations. In: Proceedings DARPA Information Survivability Conference & Exposition, DISCEX 2000, vol. 1, pp. 34–40. IEEE CS Press (1999)
Syverson, P., Tsudik, G., Reed, M., Landwehr, C.: Towards an Analysis of Onion Routing Security. In: Federrath, H. (ed.) Anonymity 2000. LNCS, vol. 2009, pp. 96–114. Springer, Heidelberg (2001)
Tang, C., Goldberg, I.: An improved algorithm for Tor circuit scheduling. Technical Report CACR 2010-06, University of Waterloo, Center for Applied Cryptography Research (2010), http://www.cacr.math.uwaterloo.ca/techreports/2010/cacr2010-06.pdf
The Tor Project (2009), https://www.torproject.org/ ; Homepage of the non-profit organization that maintains and develops the Tor network. Original Tor design first published in [14]
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Syverson, P. (2013). Why I’m Not an Entropist. In: Christianson, B., Malcolm, J.A., Matyáš, V., Roe, M. (eds) Security Protocols XVII. Security Protocols 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7028. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36213-2_25
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36213-2_25
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-36212-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-36213-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)