Abstract
How to hide who is communicating with whom? How to hide when a person is communicating? How to even hide the existence of ongoing communications? Partial answers to these questions have already been proposed, usually as byproducts of anonymity providing systems. The most advanced one available today is Onion-Routing and is implemented in Tor and I2P. Still, Onion-Routing is exposed to a series of serious attacks. The current paper classifies these series of attacks, and announces the TrueNyms unobservability protocol. We describe here how TrueNyms handles one of the families of attacks applying to the current Onion-Routing system, namely traffic analysis on the “shape”, and give some evidence on its performance. Developed since 2003, TrueNyms is not anymore an academic answer to a privacy problem, but is a heavily tested and efficient product providing unobservability and anonymity. Although it cannot be used (for the time-being) for very low-latency applications like telephony over IP, TrueNyms can be efficiently used for most low-latency applications like Web browsing and HTTP-based protocols (RSS for instance), Instant Messaging, File transfers, audio and video streaming, remote shell, etc. TrueNyms allows parties to communicate without revealing anything about the communication — including its very existence — to any observer, despite how powerful such an observer might be.
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Bernard, N., Leprévost, F. (2012). Beyond TOR: The TrueNyms Protocol. In: Bouvry, P., Kłopotek, M.A., Leprévost, F., Marciniak, M., Mykowiecka, A., Rybiński, H. (eds) Security and Intelligent Information Systems. SIIS 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7053. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25261-7_6
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