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Bounds on the Leakage of the Input’s Distribution in Information-Hiding Protocols

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Trustworthy Global Computing (TGC 2008)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 5474))

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Abstract

In information-hiding, an adversary that tries to infer the secret information has a higher probability of success if it knows the distribution on the secrets. We show that if the system leaks probabilistically some information about the secrets, (that is, if there is a probabilistic correlation between the secrets and some observables) then the adversary can approximate such distribution by repeating the observations. More precisely, it can approximate the distribution on the observables by computing their frequencies, and then derive the distribution on the secrets by using the correlation in the inverse direction. We illustrate this method, and then we study the bounds on the approximation error associated with it, for various natural notions of error. As a case study, we apply our results to Crowds, a protocol for anonymous communication.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Kanpur, India

    Abhishek Bhowmick

  2. INRIA Saclay and LIX, Ecole Polytechnique, France

    Catuscia Palamidessi

Authors
  1. Abhishek Bhowmick
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  2. Catuscia Palamidessi
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Engineering and Informatics, University of Patras and RA CTI, 26500, Rion, Greece

    Christos Kaklamanis

  2. Department of Informatics and Mathematical Modelling, Richard Pedersens Plads, Technical University of Denmark, 2800, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark

    Flemming Nielson

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Bhowmick, A., Palamidessi, C. (2009). Bounds on the Leakage of the Input’s Distribution in Information-Hiding Protocols. In: Kaklamanis, C., Nielson, F. (eds) Trustworthy Global Computing. TGC 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5474. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00945-7_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00945-7_3

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-00944-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-00945-7

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