Trust-based anonymous communication: adversary models and routing algorithms

  • Authors:

  • Aaron M. Johnson;Paul Syverson;Roger Dingledine;Nick Mathewson

  • Affiliations:

  • U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC, DC, USA;U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC, DC, USA;The Tor Project, Philadelphia, PA, USA;The Tor Project, Cambridge, MA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 18th ACM conference on Computer and communications security
  • Year:
  • 2011

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

We introduce a novel model of routing security that incorporates the ordinarily overlooked variations in trust that users have for different parts of the network. We focus on anonymous communication, and in particular onion routing, although we expect the approach to apply more broadly. This paper provides two main contributions. First, we present a novel model to consider the various security concerns for route selection in anonymity networks when users vary their trust over parts of the network. Second, to show the usefulness of our model, we present as an example a new algorithm to select paths in onion routing. We analyze its effectiveness against deanonymization and other information leaks, and particularly how it fares in our model versus existing algorithms, which do not consider trust. In contrast to those, we find that our trust-based routing strategy can protect anonymity against an adversary capable of attacking a significant fraction of the network.