Abstract
Many systems provide anonymity for their users, and most of these systems work on the separation between the users’ identity and the final destination. The level of anonymity these services provide is affected by several factors, some of which are related to the design of the anonymity service itself. Others are related to how the system is used or the user’s application/purpose in using the anonymity service. In this paper we: (i) propose five factors that aim to measure anonymity level from the user’s perspective; (ii) evaluate these factors for three anonymity services, namely Tor, JonDonym, and I2P as case studies; and (iii) present a mechanism to evaluate anonymity services based on the proposed factors and measure their levels of anonymity.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Dhiah el Diehn, A.-T., Pimenidis, L., Schomburg, J., Westermann, B.: Usability inspection of anonymity networks. In: 2009 World Congress on Privacy, Security, Trust and the Management of e-Business, CONGRESS 2009, pp. 100–109. IEEE (2009)
Chaum, D.: The dining cryptographers problem: unconditional sender and recipient untraceability. J. cryptol. 1(1), 65–75 (1988)
Clark, J., Van Oorschot, P.C., Adams, C.: Usability of anonymous web browsing: an examination of Tor interfaces and deployability. In: Proceedings of the 3rd Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security, pp. 41–51. ACM (2007)
Díaz, C., Seys, S., Claessens, J., Preneel, B.: Towards measuring anonymity. In: Dingledine, R., Syverson, P. (eds.) PET 2002. LNCS, vol. 2482, pp. 54–68. Springer, Heidelberg (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36467-6_5
Garlic routing (2014). https://geti2p.net/en/docs/how/garlic-routing
I2P’s threat model: Harvesting attacks (2010). https://geti2p.net/en/docs/how/threat-model
HTTPS-everywhere extension. https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Anonymous surfing with JonDoFox (n.d.). https://anonymous-proxy-servers.net/en/jondofox.html
Jondonym InfoService (n.d.). https://anonymous-proxy-servers.net/en/help/infoservice.html
Maymounkov, P., Mazières, D.: Kademlia: a peer-to-peer information system based on the XOR metric. In: Druschel, P., Kaashoek, F., Rowstron, A. (eds.) IPTPS 2002. LNCS, vol. 2429, pp. 53–65. Springer, Heidelberg (2002). https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45748-8_5
McCoy, D., Bauer, K., Grunwald, D., Kohno, T., Sicker, D.: Shining light in dark places: understanding the Tor network. In: Borisov, N., Goldberg, I. (eds.) PETS 2008. LNCS, vol. 5134, pp. 63–76. Springer, Heidelberg (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-70630-4_5
Murdoch, S.J.: Quantifying and measuring anonymity. In: Garcia-Alfaro, J., Lioudakis, G., Cuppens-Boulahia, N., Foley, S., Fitzgerald, W.M. (eds.) DPM/SETOP -2013. LNCS, vol. 8247, pp. 3–13. Springer, Heidelberg (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54568-9_1
Ries, T., Panchenko, A., Engel, T., et al.: Comparison of low-latency anonymous communication systems: practical usage and performance. In: Proceedings of the Ninth Australasian Information Security Conference, vol. 116, pp. 77–86. Australian Computer Society, Inc. (2011)
Serjantov, A., Danezis, G.: Towards an information theoretic metric for anonymity. In: Dingledine, R., Syverson, P. (eds.) PET 2002. LNCS, vol. 2482, pp. 41–53. Springer, Heidelberg (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36467-6_4
The design and implementation of the Tor browser (2017). https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/#idm29
Tor Obfs3 (n.d.). https://gitweb.torproject.org/pluggable-transports/obfsproxy.git/tree/doc/obfs3/obfs3-protocol-spec.txt
Tor pluggable transports (n.d.). https://www.torproject.org/docs/pluggable-transports.html.en
Wendolsky, R., Herrmann, D., Federrath, H.: Performance comparison of low-latency anonymisation services from a user perspective. In: Borisov, N., Golle, P. (eds.) PET 2007. LNCS, vol. 4776, pp. 233–253. Springer, Heidelberg (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-75551-7_15
Winter, P., Pulls, T., Fuss, J.: ScrambleSuit: a polymorphic network protocol to circumvent censorship. In: Proceedings of the 12th ACM Workshop on Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society, pp. 213–224. ACM (2013)
Acknowledgment
This research is partially supported by the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) grant, and is conducted as part of the Dalhousie NIMS Lab at http://projects.cs.dal.ca/projectx/. The first author would like to thank the Ministry of Higher Education in Saudi Arabia for his scholarship.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature
About this paper
Cite this paper
Shahbar, K., Zincir-Heywood, A.N. (2018). Weighted Factors for Evaluating Anonymity. In: Imine, A., Fernandez, J., Marion, JY., Logrippo, L., Garcia-Alfaro, J. (eds) Foundations and Practice of Security. FPS 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10723. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75650-9_20
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75650-9_20
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-75649-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-75650-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)