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International Workshop on Information Hiding

IH 2011: Information Hiding pp 133–147Cite as

Anonymity Attacks on Mix Systems: A Formal Analysis

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 6958))

Abstract

Information theory turned out to be very useful in analyzing anonymity attacks in general. The concept of channel information leak is a good indicator of how successful an attack can be. While different information leak measures exist in the literature, the problem of representing anonymity systems using noisy channels has not been well studied. The main goal of this paper is to show how anonymity attacks on mix systems can be formally represented as noisy channels in the information-theoretic sense. This formal representation provides a deeper understanding of mix systems and prepares the field for a more rigorous and accurate analysis of possible attacks. We performed empirical analysis using three information leak measures (mutual information, KLSD, and Min-entropy) which revealed interesting findings about some mix variants. This paper tries to bridge the gap between theory and practice in the field of anonymous communication systems.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Information and Computer Science Department, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia

    Sami Zhioua

Authors
  1. Sami Zhioua
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Digimarc Corporation, 9405 Gemini Drive, 97008, Beaverton, OR, USA

    Tomáš Filler

  2. Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Department of Cybernetics, Czech Technical University, Karlovo namesti 13, 121 35, Prague 2, Czech Republic

    Tomáš Pevný

  3. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, T. J. Watson School, SUNY Binghamton, 13902, Binghamton, NY, USA

    Scott Craver

  4. Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, Wolfson Building, Parks Road, OX1 3QD, Oxford, UK

    Andrew Ker

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Zhioua, S. (2011). Anonymity Attacks on Mix Systems: A Formal Analysis. In: Filler, T., Pevný, T., Craver, S., Ker, A. (eds) Information Hiding. IH 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6958. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24178-9_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24178-9_10

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-24177-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-24178-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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