Abstract
In anonymous group messaging any group member may wish to send a message anonymously to the other members, and all members follow a defined protocol. Not all members can be trusted, meaning that some may disclose relevant information to an adversary, and our adversary could have complete access to network communications.
We will discuss here the protocol setup and start-up phase in anonymous messaging: this phase is highly critical and can actually compromise the anonymity of subsequent communication the very goal we wanted to achieve. The start-up phase actually represents a secondary communication channel, where relevant information is released, that can be caught by an adversary.
Two cases will be discussed: onion routing (section 1) and token passing (section 2).
The first case dates back to Mix-nets [1], and has being addressed in substantial later research [13-15]. Here we will specifically refer to the newest real-world Internet implementation of Tor, as described in [2]. In Tor, we have a free topology, where the actual path of messages within the onion router (OR) network is chosen at the source. This path-setup phase can be seen as part of communications on a secondary channel, that can provide useful information to an adversary.
The second case is based on new protocol, based on token passing over a fixed ring topology. The method can be related to some characteristics of DC-nets [6, 16, 17], and in particular to the Dissent [3] system. In the token passing system a start-up phase requires choosing the node that will first transmit relevant information, as well as guaranteeing that any node will be able to communicate (anti-starvation policy). The start-up phase, again, may contain secondary channels that will need special attention. The discussion is limited to 3 nodes, and the general n-node case is left for future work.
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Bergadano, F. (2013). Communication Setup in Anonymous Messaging. In: Christianson, B., Malcolm, J., Stajano, F., Anderson, J., Bonneau, J. (eds) Security Protocols XXI. Security Protocols 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8263. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41717-7_18
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