Abstract
How to hide who is communicating with whom? How to hide when a person is communicating? How to even hide the existence of ongoing communications? Partial answers to these questions have already been proposed, usually as byproducts of anonymity providing systems. The most advanced one available today is Onion-Routing and is implemented in Tor and I2P. Still, Onion-Routing is exposed to a series of serious attacks. The current paper classifies these series of attacks, and announces the TrueNyms unobservability protocol. We describe here how TrueNyms handles one of the families of attacks applying to the current Onion-Routing system, namely traffic analysis on the “shape”, and give some evidence on its performance. Developed since 2003, TrueNyms is not anymore an academic answer to a privacy problem, but is a heavily tested and efficient product providing unobservability and anonymity. Although it cannot be used (for the time-being) for very low-latency applications like telephony over IP, TrueNyms can be efficiently used for most low-latency applications like Web browsing and HTTP-based protocols (RSS for instance), Instant Messaging, File transfers, audio and video streaming, remote shell, etc. TrueNyms allows parties to communicate without revealing anything about the communication — including its very existence — to any observer, despite how powerful such an observer might be.
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
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Back, A., Möller, U., Stiglic, A.: Traffic analysis attacks and trade-offs in anonymity providing systems. In: Moskowitz, I.S. (ed.) IH 2001. LNCS, vol. 2137, pp. 245–257. Springer, Heidelberg (2001)
Bauer, K., McCoy, D., Grunwald, D., Kohno, T., Sicker, D.: Low-resource routing attacks against Tor. In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES 2007), Washington, DC, USA (October 2007)
Bernard, N., Leprévost, F.: Unobservability of low-latency communications: the TrueNyms protocol. Work in Progress (2011)
Bissias, G.D., Liberatore, M., Jensen, D., Levine, B.N.: Privacy vulnerabilities in encrypted HTTP streams. In: Danezis, G., Martin, D. (eds.) PET 2005. LNCS, vol. 3856, pp. 1–11. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Campbell, D.: A new way to do anonymity. STOA European Parliament 168.184/Part.4 (April 04, 1999)
Dai, W.: A new way to do anonymity. Post to Cypherpunks Mailing List (February 07, 1995)
Danezis, G.: The traffic analysis of continuous-time mixes. In: Martin, D., Serjantov, A. (eds.) PET 2004. LNCS, vol. 3424, pp. 35–50. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Dingledine, R., Mathewson, N., Syverson, P.: Tor: The second-generation onion router. In: Proceedings of the 13th USENIX Security Symposium (August 2004)
Ebrahimi, T., Leprévost, F., Warusfel, B. (eds.): Enjeux de la sécurité multimédia. Informatique et Systèmes d’Information, Hermes-Lavoisier (2006)
Evans, N., Dingledine, R., Grothoff, C.: A practical congestion attack on tor using long paths. In: Proceedings of the 18th USENIX Security Symposium (August 2009)
Fu, X., Graham, B., Bettati, R., Zhao, W.: Active traffic analysis attacks and countermeasures. In: Proceedings of the 2003 International Conference on Computer Networks and Mobile Computing, pp. 31–39 (2003)
Goldschlag, D.M., Reed, M.G., Syverson, P.F.: Hiding Routing Information. In: Anderson, R. (ed.) IH 1996. LNCS, vol. 1174, pp. 137–150. Springer, Heidelberg (1996)
Herrmann, D., Wendolsky, R., Federrath, H.: Website fingerprinting: attacking popular privacy enhancing technologies with the multinomial naïve-bayes classifier. In: Proceedings of the 2009 ACM Workshop on Cloud Computing Security (CCSW 2009), pp. 31–42. ACM, New York (2009)
Hintz, A.: Fingerprinting websites using traffic analysis. In: Dingledine, R., Syverson, P.F. (eds.) PET 2002. LNCS, vol. 2482, pp. 171–178. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
The Invisible Internet Project: Introducing I2P (200x), http://www.i2p2.de/
Kent, S., Atkinson, R.: RFC 2401 Security Architecture for IP. IETF (1998)
Liberatore, M., Levine, B.N.: Inferring the Source of Encrypted HTTP Connections. In: Proceedings of the 13th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2006), pp. 255–263 (October 2006)
McLachlan, J., Hopper, N.: On the risks of serving whenever you surf: Vulnerabilities in Tor’s blocking resistance design. In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES 2009). ACM (November 2009)
Murdoch, S.J.: Hot or not: Revealing hidden services by their clock skew. In: Proceedings of CCS 2006 (October 2006)
Murdoch, S.J., Danezis, G.: Low-cost traffic analysis of Tor. In: Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. IEEE CS (May 2005)
Murdoch, S.J., Zieliński, P.: Sampled traffic analysis by internet-exchange-level adversaries. In: Borisov, N., Golle, P. (eds.) PET 2007. LNCS, vol. 4776, pp. 167–183. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
O’Connor, L.: On blending attacks for mixes with memory. In: Barni, M., Herrera-Joancomartí, J., Katzenbeisser, S., Pérez-González, F. (eds.) IH 2005. LNCS, vol. 3727, pp. 39–52. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Øverlier, L., Syverson, P.: Locating hidden servers. In: Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. IEEE CS (May 2006)
Reed, M.G., Syverson, P.F., Goldschlag, D.M.: Anonymous connections and onion routing. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications 16(4), 482–494 (1998)
Rescorla, E.: SSL and TLS – Designing and Building Secure Systems. Addison-Wesley (2001)
Rybczyńska, M.: Network-level properties of modern anonymity systems. In: Proceedings of the International Multiconference on Computer Science and Information Technology, pp. 837–843 (2008)
Rybczyńska, M.: A round-based cover traffic algorithm for anonymity systems. In: 2009 International Conference on Intelligent Networking and Collaborative Systems, pp. 93–99 (2009)
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)
Shmatikov, V., Wang, M.H.: Measuring relationship anonymity in mix networks. In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES 2006) (October 2006)
Wang, M.-H.: Timing analysis in low-latency mix networks: Attacks and defenses. In: Gollmann, D., Meier, J., Sabelfeld, A. (eds.) ESORICS 2006. LNCS, vol. 4189, pp. 18–33. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Sun, Q., Simon, D.R., Wang, Y.M., Russell, W., Padmanabhan, V.N., Qiu, L.: Statistical identification of encrypted web browsing traffic. In: Proceedings of the 2002 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, Berkeley, California (May 2002)
Wright, C.V., Monrose, F., Masson, G.M.: On inferring application protocol behaviors in encrypted network traffic. Journal of Machine Learning Research 7, 2745–2769 (2006)
Zalewski, M.: Silence on the Wire: a Field Guide to Passive Reconnaissance and Indirect Attacks. No Starch Press (2005)
Zhu, Y., Fu, X., Graham, B., Bettati, R., Zhao, W.: On flow correlation attacks and countermeasures in mix networks. In: Martin, D., Serjantov, A. (eds.) PET 2004. LNCS, vol. 3424, pp. 207–225. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Bernard, N., Leprévost, F. (2012). Beyond TOR: The TrueNyms Protocol. In: Bouvry, P., Kłopotek, M.A., Leprévost, F., Marciniak, M., Mykowiecka, A., Rybiński, H. (eds) Security and Intelligent Information Systems. SIIS 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7053. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25261-7_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25261-7_6
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-25260-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-25261-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)