Source Accountability with Domain-brokered Privacy

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel network architecture that ensures source accountability and privacy by using ISPs as intermediaries and cryptographic EphIDs, balancing attribution with privacy.

Contribution

It proposes a new architecture leveraging ISPs as accountability agents and privacy brokers, utilizing EphIDs for efficient, privacy-preserving source attribution.

Findings

EphIDs can be generated and processed efficiently.

The architecture maintains source accountability without revealing identities.

Practical deployment considerations are analyzed.

Abstract

In an ideal network, every packet would be attributable to its sender, while host identities and transmitted content would remain private. Designing such a network is challenging because source accountability and communication privacy are typically viewed as conflicting properties. In this paper, we propose an architecture that guarantees source accountability and privacy-preserving communication by enlisting ISPs as accountability agents and privacy brokers. While ISPs can link every packet in their network to their customers, customer identity remains unknown to the rest of the Internet. In our architecture, network communication is based on Ephemeral Identifiers (EphIDs)---cryptographic tokens that can be linked to a source only by the source's ISP. We demonstrate that EphIDs can be generated and processed efficiently, and we analyze the practical considerations for deployment.