Defending Anonymous Communications Against Passive Logging Attacks

  • Authors:
  • Matthew Wright;Micah Adler;Brian N. Levine;Clay Shields

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-;-

  • Venue:
  • SP '03 Proceedings of the 2003 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
  • Year:
  • 2003

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

We study the threat that passive logging attacks poseto anonymous communications. Previous work analyzedthese attacks under limiting assumptions. We first describea possible defense that comes from breaking the assumptionof uniformly random path selection. Our analysisshows that the defense improves anonymity in the staticmodel, where nodes stay in the system, but fails in a dynamicmodel, in which nodes leave and join. Additionally,we use the dynamic model to show that the intersectionattack creates a vulnerability in certain peer-to-peer systemsfor anonymous communciations. We present simulationresults that show that attack times are significantlylower in practice than the upper bounds given by previouswork. To determine whether users' web traffic has communicationpatterns required by the attacks, we collectedand analyzed the web requests of users. We found that,for our study, frequent and repeated communication to thesame web site is common.