Dissent: accountable anonymous group messaging

By Henry Corrigan-Gibbs, Bryan Ford. 2010

247 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Users often wish to participate in online groups anonymously, but misbehaving users may abuse this anonymity to disrupt the group's communication. Existing messaging protocols such as DC-nets leave groups vulnerable to denial-of-service and Sybil attacks, Mix-nets are difficult to protect against traffic analysis, and accountable voting protocols are unsuited to general anonymous messaging. We present the first general messaging protocol that offers provable anonymity with accountability for moderate-size groups, and efficiently handles unbalanced loads where few members wish to transmit in a given round. The N group members first cooperatively shuffle an N x N matrix of pseudorandom seeds, then use these seeds in N "pre-planned" DC-nets protocol runs. Each DC-nets run transmits the variable-length bulk data comprising one member's message, using the minimum number of bits required for anonymity under our attack model. The protocol preserves message integrity and one-to-one correspondence between members and messages, makes denial-of-service attacks by members traceable to the culprit, and efficiently handles large, unbalanced message loads. A working prototype demonstrates the protocol's practicality for anonymous messaging in groups of 40+ members.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Information Systems, Sociology and Political Science

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Citations in the corpus

Proactively Accountable Anonymous Messaging in Verdict (2012, background): “The original Dissent protocol [14] offered accountability but limited performance.”
A Survey on Security and Privacy Issues of Bitcoin (2017, background): “In peer-to-peer (P2P) mixing protocols [118], [158], [167], a set of untrusted Bitcoin users simultaneously broadcast their messages to create a series of transactions without requiring”
A Survey on Security and Privacy Issues in Internet-of-Things (2017, unknown): “The anonymous data aggregation has been studied in many previous works [38]–[42].”
Dissent in Numbers: Making Strong Anonymity Scale (2012, unknown): “The first version of Dissent [20] focused on accountability rather than scalability, combining verifiable shuffles with DC-nets to prevent anonymous disruption, but scaled only to 44-node groups.”
Hang with your buddies to resist intersection attacks (2013, unknown): “We have built a working prototype of Buddies atop Dissent [4, 32, 5], a recent anonymous communi-”
A Protocol for Privately Reporting Ad Impressions at Scale (2016, background): “These run the range from improvements to Tor [41], to alternatives [31, 33, 35], to a line of works on scalable mixnets [20, 21], and dining cryptographer networks [17, 43, 18].”
Stadium: A Distributed Metadata-Private Messaging System (2017, background): “Dissent [15, 47] is an anonymous messaging system based on DC-nets.”
Privacy-Preserving Solutions for Blockchain: Review and Challenges (2019, background): “also a decentralized mixing protocol for bitcoin based on the anonymous group communication protocol Dissent [236] to ensure anonymity and robustness against DoS attacks.”
This Paper Is Included in the Proceedings of the 12th Usenix Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (osdi '16). Unobservable Communication over Fully Untrusted Infrastructure Unobservable Communication over Fully Untrusted Infrastructure (unknown): “There are proposals that do not require trusting the communication infrastructure [26] [33] [42] [60] [66] [131], but they have been primarily theoretical since the resulting systems support only dozens of concurrent users.”
CoinShuffle: Practical Decentralized Coin Mixing for Bitcoin (2014, methodology): “CoinShuffle is inspired by CoinJoin [20] to ensure security against theft and by the accountable anonymous group communication protocol Dissent [28] to ensure anonymity as well as robustness against DoS attacks.”