Towards efficient traffic-analysis resistant anonymity networks

By Stevens Le Blond, David R. Choffnes, Wenxuan Zhou, Peter Druschel, Hitesh Ballani, Paul Francis. 2013

91 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Existing IP anonymity systems tend to sacrifice one of low latency, high bandwidth, or resistance to traffic-analysis. High-latency mix-nets like Mixminion batch messages to resist traffic-analysis at the expense of low latency. Onion routing schemes like Tor deliver low latency and high bandwidth, but are not designed to withstand traffic analysis. Designs based on DC-nets or broadcast channels resist traffic analysis and provide low latency, but are limited to low bandwidth communication. In this paper, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of Aqua, a high-bandwidth anonymity system that resists traffic analysis. We focus on providing strong anonymity for BitTorrent, and evaluate the performance of Aqua using traces from hundreds of thousands of actual BitTorrent users. We show that Aqua achieves latency low enough for efficient bulk TCP flows, bandwidth sufficient to carry BitTorrent traffic with reasonable efficiency, and resistance to traffic analysis within anonymity sets of hundreds of clients. We conclude that Aqua represents an interesting new point in the space of anonymity network designs.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Networks and Communications, Information Systems

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Citations in the corpus

Honeycrisp: large-scale differentially private aggregation without a trusted core (2019, background): “Other privacy guarantees: Many existing systems for collecting sensitive data rely on secret-sharing [18, 44, 50], anonymizing networks [35, 51] or even systems like Tor [42, 63] to aggregate the data privately, but do not explicitly make use of differential privacy.”
Prio: Private, Robust, and Scalable Computation of Aggregate Statistics (2017, background): “PrivStats [100] and ANONIZE [76] outsource to Tor [51] (or another low-latency anonymity system [61, 88,101]) the work of protecting privacy against a network adversary (Figure 10).”
Riposte: An Anonymous Messaging System Handling Millions of Users (2015, background): “Aqua [54], Crowds [72], LAP [49], ShadowWalker [60], Tarzan [32], and Tor [28] belong to the first category of systems: they provide an anonymous proxy for real-time Web browsing, but they do not protect against an adversary who controls the network, many of the clients, and some of the nodes on a v”
SGX-LKL: Securing the Host OS Interface for Trusted Execution (2019, background): “To scale to more clients and to hide the set of potential recipients, traffic could alternatively be routed through a single trusted proxy [12, 18, 59].”
Hang with your buddies to resist intersection attacks (2013, background): “Aqua [6] uses padded, multipath onion routing to achieve efficiency and reduce vulnerability to traffic analysis.”