Onions based on universal re-encryption – anonymous communication immune against repetitive attack

  • Authors:

  • Marcin Gomułkiewicz;Marek Klonowski;Mirosław Kutyłowski

  • Affiliations:

  • Institute of Mathematics, Wrocław University of Technology, Wrocław, Poland;Institute of Mathematics, Wrocław University of Technology, Wrocław, Poland;Institute of Mathematics, Wrocław University of Technology, Wrocław, Poland

  • Venue:
  • WISA'04 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Information Security Applications
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

Encapsulating messages in onions is one of the major techniques providing anonymous communication in computer networks. To some extent, it provides security against traffic analysis by a passive adversary. However, it can be highly vulnerable to attacks by an active adversary. For instance, the adversary may perform a simple so–called repetitive attack: a malicious server sends the same massage twice, then the adversary traces places where the same message appears twice – revealing the route of the original message. A repetitive attack was examined for mix–networks. However, none of the countermeasures designed is suitable for onion–routing. In this paper we propose an “onion-like” encoding design based on universal re-encryption. The onions constructed in this way can be used in a protocol that achieves the same goals as the classical onions, however, at the same time we achieve immunity against a repetitive attack. Even if an adversary disturbs communication and prevents processing a message somewhere on the onion path, it is easy to identify the malicious server performing the attack and provide an evidence of its illegal behavior.