Researching Tor: Quantifying anonymity against a global passive adversary
Hi there, I am currently writing my Master's thesis about Mix networks & Tor (was on list previously). I am currently at a point, where I'd like to practially quantify anonymity. That is, given a pcap, I want to anaylze how successful an adversary can determine whether a specific client talked to a specific service. Since I run all of this in a simulation (using Shadow), I have access to ground truth and can determine the traffic, network size, etc. arbitrarily. The idea behind all of this is to integrate a Mix relay on each Tor node and to watch how the adversarys success behaves. However, I have a hard time finding material on such attacks, i.e. papers that closely examine this scenario (and perhaps have conducted some simulation and/or measurements themselves, beyond simple theory). The thing is that this is only part of the research and I'd really prefer if I could build this upon work of others instead of starting from scratch. Do any of you know of such papers or corresponding research? Regards, Florian
Hello Florian, I just saw your mail on tor-dev. The assumption a number of us have been using in our work, is that if the adversary observes a circuit at two different locations, then it can link it. This is a bit like assigning a unique ID to each circuit, and assuming that seeing the link / node on which the circuit operates, reveals this ID. Then you can use techniques such a monte-carlo simulation to evaluate the probability say Alice is talking to Bob as described in this paper: The Bayesian Traffic Analysis of Mix networks. Carmela Troncoso and George Danezis. ACM CCS 2009. Also: what are your plans for the future? I am advertising a PhD on this topic if that is something that would interest you: http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/G.Danezis/positions.html Best, George On Wed, Jun 3, 2015 at 12:38 PM, Florian Rüchel <florian.ruechel.tor@inexplicity.de> wrote:
Hi there,
I am currently writing my Master's thesis about Mix networks & Tor (was on list previously). I am currently at a point, where I'd like to practially quantify anonymity. That is, given a pcap, I want to anaylze how successful an adversary can determine whether a specific client talked to a specific service. Since I run all of this in a simulation (using Shadow), I have access to ground truth and can determine the traffic, network size, etc. arbitrarily.
The idea behind all of this is to integrate a Mix relay on each Tor node and to watch how the adversarys success behaves. However, I have a hard time finding material on such attacks, i.e. papers that closely examine this scenario (and perhaps have conducted some simulation and/or measurements themselves, beyond simple theory). The thing is that this is only part of the research and I'd really prefer if I could build this upon work of others instead of starting from scratch.
Do any of you know of such papers or corresponding research?
Regards, Florian _______________________________________________ tor-dev mailing list tor-dev@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-dev
This is my favorite paper on quantifying anonymity: http://dimacs.rutgers.edu/Workshops/Anonymous/bagai.pdf -V
participants (3)
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Florian Rüchel -
George Danezis -
Virgil Griffith