A Survey on Anonymous Communication Systems with a Focus on Dining Cryptographers Networks
Mohsen Shirali, Tobias Tefke, Ralf C. Staudemeyer, Henrich C. Poehls

TL;DR
This survey reviews advancements in Anonymous Communication Systems, especially Dining Cryptographers Networks, highlighting recent improvements in efficiency, scalability, and privacy property definitions to enhance practical deployment.
Contribution
It introduces a harmonized terminology for privacy properties, reviews recent progress in DCN-based methods, and discusses their applicability in resource-constrained environments.
Findings
Recent DCN improvements enable message length flexibility
Enhanced disruption handling and overhead reduction
Unified privacy property terminology for better comparison
Abstract
Traffic analysis attacks can counteract end-to-end encryption and use leaked communication metadata to reveal information about communicating parties. With an ever-increasing amount of traffic by an ever-increasing number of networked devices, communication privacy is undermined. Therefore, Anonymous Communication Systems (ACSs) are proposed to hide the relationship between transmitted messages and their senders and receivers, providing privacy properties known as anonymity, unlinkability, and unobservability. This article aims to review research in the ACSs field, focusing on Dining Cryptographers Networks (DCNs). The DCN-based methods are information-theoretically secure and thus provide unconditional unobservability guarantees. Their adoption for anonymous communications was initially hindered because their computational and communication overhead was deemed significant at that time,…
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Taxonomy
TopicsInternet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting · Network Security and Intrusion Detection · Advanced Malware Detection Techniques
