Link padding and the intersection attack

[Roger Dingledine]

On Thu, Aug 08, 2002 at 11:27:16PM -0400, Roger Dingledine wrote:
> > So, what are the fake messages, where are they sent (uniformly at random
> > to routers?), and what is the n^2 -- the number of times such a (single?)
> > fake message is sent?

$n^2$ refers to each router doing link padding to every other router
in the network -- so there are n^2 such links that could carry traffic,
and thus need padding if you want to hide whether traffic is present. As
we get more volunteers, it becomes impractical to pad to all of them. So
we either need less expensive padding approaches, or network topologies
that are less clique-ish (or some other creative trick).

--Roger