Communication anonymity is a key requirement for individuals under targeted
surveillance. Practical anonymous communications also require
indistinguishability - an adversary should be unable to distinguish between
anonymised and non-anonymised traffic for a given user. We propose Blindspot, a
design for high-latency anonymous communications that offers
indistinguishability and unobservability under a (qualified) global active
adversary. Blindspot creates anonymous routes between sender-receiver pairs by
subliminally encoding messages within the pre-existing communication behaviour
of users within a social network. Specifically, the organic image sharing
behaviour of users. Thus channel bandwidth depends on the intensity of image
sharing behaviour of users along a route. A major challenge we successfully
overcome is that routing must be accomplished in the face of significant
restrictions - channel bandwidth is stochastic. We show that conventional
social network routing strategies do not work. To solve this problem, we
propose a novel routing algorithm. We evaluate Blindspot using a real-world
dataset. We find that it delivers reasonable results for applications requiring
low-volume unobservable communication.
%0 Generic
%1 Gardiner2014Blindspot
%A Gardiner, Joseph
%A Nagaraja, Shishir
%D 2014
%K routing, security networks preprint
%T Blindspot: Indistinguishable Anonymous Communications
%U http://arxiv.org/abs/1408.0784
%X Communication anonymity is a key requirement for individuals under targeted
surveillance. Practical anonymous communications also require
indistinguishability - an adversary should be unable to distinguish between
anonymised and non-anonymised traffic for a given user. We propose Blindspot, a
design for high-latency anonymous communications that offers
indistinguishability and unobservability under a (qualified) global active
adversary. Blindspot creates anonymous routes between sender-receiver pairs by
subliminally encoding messages within the pre-existing communication behaviour
of users within a social network. Specifically, the organic image sharing
behaviour of users. Thus channel bandwidth depends on the intensity of image
sharing behaviour of users along a route. A major challenge we successfully
overcome is that routing must be accomplished in the face of significant
restrictions - channel bandwidth is stochastic. We show that conventional
social network routing strategies do not work. To solve this problem, we
propose a novel routing algorithm. We evaluate Blindspot using a real-world
dataset. We find that it delivers reasonable results for applications requiring
low-volume unobservable communication.
@misc{Gardiner2014Blindspot,
abstract = {{Communication anonymity is a key requirement for individuals under targeted
surveillance. Practical anonymous communications also require
indistinguishability - an adversary should be unable to distinguish between
anonymised and non-anonymised traffic for a given user. We propose Blindspot, a
design for high-latency anonymous communications that offers
indistinguishability and unobservability under a (qualified) global active
adversary. Blindspot creates anonymous routes between sender-receiver pairs by
subliminally encoding messages within the pre-existing communication behaviour
of users within a social network. Specifically, the organic image sharing
behaviour of users. Thus channel bandwidth depends on the intensity of image
sharing behaviour of users along a route. A major challenge we successfully
overcome is that routing must be accomplished in the face of significant
restrictions - channel bandwidth is stochastic. We show that conventional
social network routing strategies do not work. To solve this problem, we
propose a novel routing algorithm. We evaluate Blindspot using a real-world
dataset. We find that it delivers reasonable results for applications requiring
low-volume unobservable communication.}},
added-at = {2019-06-10T14:53:09.000+0200},
archiveprefix = {arXiv},
author = {Gardiner, Joseph and Nagaraja, Shishir},
biburl = {https://www.bibsonomy.org/bibtex/263e676f3731c58204a0890dbecdc45b7/nonancourt},
citeulike-article-id = {13320848},
citeulike-linkout-0 = {http://arxiv.org/abs/1408.0784},
citeulike-linkout-1 = {http://arxiv.org/pdf/1408.0784},
day = 5,
eprint = {1408.0784},
interhash = {640c6f8a977a922cd317ee6badffe15c},
intrahash = {63e676f3731c58204a0890dbecdc45b7},
keywords = {routing, security networks preprint},
month = aug,
posted-at = {2014-08-09 20:28:09},
priority = {2},
timestamp = {2019-07-31T12:34:06.000+0200},
title = {{Blindspot: Indistinguishable Anonymous Communications}},
url = {http://arxiv.org/abs/1408.0784},
year = 2014
}