Skip to main content
Springer Nature Link
Log in

On Flow Correlation Attacks and Countermeasures in Mix Networks

  • Conference paper
Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET 2004)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 3424))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

In this paper, we address issues related to flow correlation attacks and the corresponding countermeasures in mix networks. Mixes have been used in many anonymous communication systems and are supposed to provide countermeasures that can defeat various traffic analysis attacks. In this paper, we focus on a particular class of traffic analysis attack, flow correlation attacks, by which an adversary attempts to analyze the network traffic and correlate the traffic of a flow over an input link at a mix with that over an output link of the same mix. Two classes of correlation methods are considered, namely time-domain methods and frequency-domain methods. Based on our threat model and known strategies in existing mix networks, we perform extensive experiments to analyze the performance of mixes. We find that a mix with any known batching strategy may fail against flow correlation attacks in the sense that for a given flow over an input link, the adversary can correctly determine which output link is used by the same flow. We also investigated methods that can effectively counter the flow correlation attack and other timing attacks. The empirical results provided in this paper give an indication to designers of Mix networks about appropriate configurations and alternative mechanisms to be used to counter flow correlation attacks.

This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Contracts 0081761 and 0324988, by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency under Contract F30602-99-1-0531, and by Texas A&M University under its Telecommunication and Information Task Force Program. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations in this material, either expressed or implied, are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsors listed above.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Song, D.X., Wagner, D., Tian, X.: Timing analysis of keystrokes and timing attacks on ssh. In: Proceedings of 10th USENIX Security Symposium (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Sun, Q., Simon, D.R., Wang, Y., Russell, W., Padmanabhan, V.N., Qiu, L.: Statistical identification of encrypted web browsing traffic. In: Proceedings of IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Chaum, D.: Untraceable electronic mail, return addresses, and digital pseudonyms. Communications of the ACM 4 (1981)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Helsingius, J.: Press release: Johan helsingius closes his internet remailer (1996), http://www.penet.fi/press-english.html

  5. Parekh, S.: Prospects for remailers - where is anonymity heading on the internet (1996), http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2/remailers/

  6. Gülcü, C., Tsudik, G.: Mixing E-mail with Babel. In: Proceedings of the Network and Distributed Security Symposium (NDSS), pp. 2–16. IEEE, Los Alamitos (1996)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  7. Möller, U., Cottrell, L.: Mixmaster Protocol — Version 2 (2000), http://www.eskimo.com/~rowdenw/crypt/Mix/draft-moeller-mixmaster2-protocol-00.txt

  8. Serjantov, A., Dingledine, R., Syverson, P.: From a trickle to a flood: active attacks on several mix types. In: Proceedings of Information Hiding Workshop (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Danezis, G., Dingledine, R., Mathewson, N.: Mixminion: Design of a Type III Anonymous Remailer Protocol. In: Proceedings of the 2003 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Back, A., Möller, U., Stiglic, A.: Traffic analysis attacks and trade-offs in anonymity providing systems. In: Proceedings of Information Hiding Workshop (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Berthold, O., Langos, H.: Dummy traffic against long term intersection attacks. In: Proceedings of Privacy Enhancing Technologies workshop (PET 2002) (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Berthold, O., Pfitzmann, A., Standtke, R.: The disadvantages of free MIX routes and how to overcome them. In: Proceedings of Designing Privacy Enhancing Technologies: Workshop on Design Issues in Anonymity and Unobservability (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Mitomo, M., Kurosawa, K.: Attack for Flash MIX. In: Okamoto, T. (ed.) ASIACRYPT 2000. LNCS, vol. 1976, p. 192. Springer, Heidelberg (2000)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  14. Raymond, J.: Traffic analysis: Protocols, attacks, design issues and open problems. In: Proceedings of Designing Privacy Enhancing Technologies: Workshop on Design Issues in Anonymity and Unobservability (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Syverson, P.F., Goldschlag, D.M., Reed, M.G.: Anonymous connections and onion routing. In: Proceedings of IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, Oakland, California, pp. 44–54 (1997)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Boucher, P., Shostack, A., Goldberg, I.: Freedom systems 2.0 architecture (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Reiter, M., Rubin, A.: Crowds: Anonymity for web transactions. ACM Transactions on Information and System Security 1 (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Freedman, M.J., Morris, R.: Tarzan: A peer-to-peer anonymizing network layer. In: Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), Washington, DC (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Sherwood, R., Bhattacharjee, B., Srinivasan, A.: p5: A protocol for scalable anonymous communication. In: Proceedings of the 2002 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Serjantov, A., Sewell, P.: Passive attack analysis for connection-based anonymity systems. In: Snekkenes, E., Gollmann, D. (eds.) ESORICS 2003. LNCS, vol. 2808, pp. 116–131. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  21. Zhu, Y., Fu, X., Graham, B., Bettati, R., Zhao, W.: Correlation attacks in a mix network. Texas A&M University Computer Science Technical Report TR2003-8-9 (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Fu, X., Graham, B., Xuan, D., Bettati, R., Zhao, W.: Analytical and empirical analysis of countermeasures to traffic analysis attacks. In: Proceedings of International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP) (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Howard, J.D.: An analysis of security incidents on the internet 1989 - 1995. Technical report, Carnegie Mellon University Dissertation (1997)

    Google Scholar 

  24. F.B.I: Carnivore diagnostic tool (2003), http://www.fbi.gov/hq/lab/carnivore/carnivore2.htm

  25. Walton, G.: China’s golden shield: Corporations and the development of surveillance technology in china (2003), http://www.totse.com/en/privacy/privacy/pucc.html

  26. Achives, O.R.D.: Link padding and the intersection attack (2002), http://archives.seul.org/or/dev

  27. tcpdump.org: tcpdump (2003), http://www.tcpdump.org/

  28. cisco.inc.: Netflow services solutions guide (2003), http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/cisintwk/intsolns/netflsol/nfwhite.htm

  29. Moddemeijer, R.: On estimation of entropy and mutual information of continuous distributions. Signal Processing 16, 233–246 (1989)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  30. MathWorks: Documentation for mathworks products (release 13) (2003), http://www.mathworks.com/access/helpdesk/help/helpdesk.shtml

  31. TimeSys: Timesys linux docs (2003), http://www.timesys.com/

  32. netfilter.org: Netfilter (2003), http://netfilter.samba.org/

  33. Rennhard, M., Rafaeli, S., Mathy, L., Plattner, B., Hutchison, D.: Analysis of an anonymity network for web browsing. In: Proceedings of Workshops on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises (WET ICE) (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  34. Guan, Y., Fu, X., Xuan, D., Shenoy, P.U., Bettati, R., Zhao, W.: Netcamo: Camouflaging network traffic for qos-guaranteed critical allplications. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Part A: Systems and Humans, Special Issue on Information Assurance 31, 253–265 (2001)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  35. Fu, X., Graham, B., Bettati, R., Zhao, W.: On effectiveness of link padding for statistical traffic analysis attacks. In: Proceedings of the 23rd IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS 2003) (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  36. Padhye, J., Firoiu, V., Towsley, D., Krusoe, J.: Modeling TCP throughput: A simple model and its empirical validation. In: Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM Special Interest Group on Data Communications (SIGCOMM) (1998)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, 77843-3112, USA

    Ye Zhu, Xinwen Fu, Bryan Graham, Riccardo Bettati & Wei Zhao

Authors
  1. Ye Zhu
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Xinwen Fu
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Bryan Graham
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Riccardo Bettati
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Wei Zhao
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Artificial Intelligence Center, SRI International,  

    David Martin

  2. The Free Haven Project,  

    Andrei Serjantov

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Zhu, Y., Fu, X., Graham, B., Bettati, R., Zhao, W. (2005). On Flow Correlation Attacks and Countermeasures in Mix Networks. In: Martin, D., Serjantov, A. (eds) Privacy Enhancing Technologies. PET 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3424. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11423409_13

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11423409_13

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-26203-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-31960-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics