Riposte: An Anonymous Messaging System Handling Millions of Users

By Henry Corrigan-Gibbs, Dan Boneh, David Mazières. 2015

293 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper presents Riposte, a new system for anonymous broadcast messaging. Riposte is the first such system, to our knowledge, that simultaneously protects against traffic-analysis attacks, prevents anonymous denial-of-service by malicious clients, and scales to million-user anonymity sets. To achieve these properties, Riposte makes novel use of techniques used in systems for private information retrieval and secure multi-party computation. For latency-tolerant workloads with many more readers than writers (e.g. Twitter, Wikileaks), we demonstrate that a three-server Riposte cluster can build an anonymity set of 2,895,216 users in 32 hours.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Privacy & Security

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Citations in the corpus

Prochlo: Strong Privacy for Analytics in the Crowd (2017, background): “Those cryptographic mechanisms—detailed in the remainder of this paper—differ from the cryptography typically used to protect privacy for aggregated analysis (or for different purposes, like Vuvuzela or Riposte private messaging [19, 72]).”
Prio: Private, Robust, and Scalable Computation of Aggregate Statistics (2017, background): “These anonymity systems provide strong privacy properties, but require expensive “verifiable mixing” techniques [8, 95], or require work at the servers that is quadratic in the number of client messages sent through the system [38, 121].”
Riffle (2016, methodology): “The second application is for anonymous microblogging, similar to applications studied in previous works [21, 53].”
Zero-Knowledge Proofs on Secret-Shared Data via Fully Linear PCPs (2019, background): “Special cases of this type of proof system appear in existing systems for anonymous messaging [40], verifiable function secret sharing [32], and systems for the private computation of aggregate statistics [39].”
SGX-LKL: Securing the Host OS Interface for Trusted Execution (2019, background): “More recently, Private Information Retrieval (PIR) [5,22,25] and differential privacy techniques [9,96,99] add noise to hide the metadata.”
COVI White Paper (2020, background): “In order to enable the privacy guarantees for core functionality, we have to build a private messaging system [67, 68, 69] that ensures that no information about”
PROCHLO: Strong Privacy for Analytics in the Crowd (2017, background): “Those cryptographic mechanisms—detailed in the remainder of this paper—differ from the cryptography typically used to protect privacy for aggregated analysis (or for different purposes, like Vuvuzela or Riposte private messaging [19, 72]).”
Vuvuzela: scalable private messaging resistant to traffic analysis (2015, unknown): “Riposte [12] can scale anonymity sets to a few million users over many hours, but still relies on broadcasts and limits writes to a few hundred per second.”
Contact Tracing Mobile Apps for COVID-19: Privacy Considerations and Related Trade-offs (2020, background): “[27; 28; 29] and private set intersection (cardinality) [30; 31; 32; 33] protocols seem especially relevant.”
Karaoke: Distributed Private Messaging Immune to Passive Traffic Analysis (2018, methodology): “Some systems leak no information to the attacker, using techniques like DC-nets [28], Private Information Retrieval [1], or message broadcast [4].”
DP5: A Private Presence Service (2015, background): “Dissent [43] and Riposte [17] are anonymous broadcast messaging systems that are also immune from traffic analysis; Dissent is based on DC-nets [13], while Riposte uses a PIR-like mechanism to allow clients to write to a private location in a per-epoch database.”
Security and Privacy in the Internet of Things (2017, background): “Unlike high-latency anonymity systems [51, 58, 116, 54] introducing delays on the order of several hours or more, low-latency anonymity systems are designed to provide better performance to support interactive applications at the cost of vulnerability to some certain traffic analysis attacks.”
Stadium: A Distributed Metadata-Private Messaging System (2017, background): “Riposte [14] for point-to-point communication and Talek [12] for publish-subscribe are based on the cryptographic technique of private information retrieval (PIR).”