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International Workshop on Privacy Enhancing Technologies

PET 2004: Privacy Enhancing Technologies pp 17–34Cite as

Practical Traffic Analysis: Extending and Resisting Statistical Disclosure

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 3424))

Abstract

We extend earlier research on mounting and resisting passive long-term end-to-end traffic analysis attacks against anonymous message systems, by describing how an eavesdropper can learn sender-receiver connections even when the substrate is a network of pool mixes, the attacker is non-global, and senders have complex behavior or generate padding messages. Additionally, we describe how an attacker can use information about message distinguishability to speed the attack. We simulate our attacks for a variety of scenarios, focusing on the amount of information needed to link senders to their recipients. In each scenario, we show that the intersection attack is slowed but still succeeds against a steady-state mix network. We find that the attack takes an impractical amount of time when message delivery times are highly variable; when the attacker can observe very little of the network; and when users pad consistently and the adversary does not know how the network behaves in their absence.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Free Haven Project,  

    Nick Mathewson & Roger Dingledine

Authors
  1. Nick Mathewson
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  2. Roger Dingledine
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Artificial Intelligence Center, SRI International,  

    David Martin

  2. The Free Haven Project,  

    Andrei Serjantov

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© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Mathewson, N., Dingledine, R. (2005). Practical Traffic Analysis: Extending and Resisting Statistical Disclosure. In: Martin, D., Serjantov, A. (eds) Privacy Enhancing Technologies. PET 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3424. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11423409_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11423409_2

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-26203-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-31960-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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