Seeking Anonymity in an Internet Panopticon
Joan Feigenbaum, Bryan Ford

TL;DR
This paper introduces Dissent, a scalable, formally provable anonymity system that addresses major vulnerabilities of existing tools like Tor, and proposes WiNon, an OS architecture to enhance security against various attacks.
Contribution
Dissent is the first scalable anonymity system based on verifiable shuffles and dining cryptographers with formal guarantees, and WiNon enhances security against software exploits.
Findings
Dissent scales to thousands of users with measurable anonymity guarantees.
Dissent systematically counters major known vulnerabilities.
WiNon improves security against exploits and self-identification.
Abstract
Obtaining and maintaining anonymity on the Internet is challenging. The state of the art in deployed tools, such as Tor, uses onion routing (OR) to relay encrypted connections on a detour passing through randomly chosen relays scattered around the Internet. Unfortunately, OR is known to be vulnerable at least in principle to several classes of attacks for which no solution is known or believed to be forthcoming soon. Current approaches to anonymity also appear unable to offer accurate, principled measurement of the level or quality of anonymity a user might obtain. Toward this end, we offer a high-level view of the Dissent project, the first systematic effort to build a practical anonymity system based purely on foundations that offer measurable and formally provable anonymity properties. Dissent builds on two key pre-existing primitives - verifiable shuffles and dining cryptographers…
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Taxonomy
TopicsInternet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting · Network Security and Intrusion Detection · Advanced Malware Detection Techniques
