Vida: How to Use Bayesian Inference to De-anonymize Persistent Communications

  • Authors:
  • George Danezis;Carmela Troncoso

  • Affiliations:
  • Microsoft Research Cambridge,;K.U. Leuven/IBBT, ESAT/SCD-COSIC,

  • Venue:
  • PETS '09 Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Privacy Enhancing Technologies
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

We present the Vida family of abstractions of anonymous communication systems, model them probabilistically and apply Bayesian inference to extract patterns of communications and user profiles. The first is a very generic Vida Black-box model that can be used to analyse information about all users in a system simultaneously, while the second is a simpler Vida Red-Blue model, that is very efficient when used to gain information about particular target senders and receivers. We evaluate the Red-Blue model to find that it is competitive with other established long-term traffic analysis attacks, while additionally providing reliable error estimates, and being more flexible and expressive.