Piercing network anonymity in real time

[StealthMonger]

Ivan Krstic <krstic at fas.harvard.edu> writes:

> Calling this "piercing network anonymity in real time" is highly
> misleading; in reality, it's more like "making it bloody obvious
> that there's no such thing as network anonymity".

No.  Ever hear of Chaum's "Dining Cryptographers" [1]?  Anonymity
right there at the table.  Been around for almost twenty years.

Strong anonymity is available today using chains of random-latency,
mixing, anonymizing remailers based on mixmaster [2], of which there
is a thriving worldwide network [3].

> The best one can hope for today is a bit of anonymous browsing and
> IM with Tor ...

Tor is indicted by its own documentation:

   ... for low-latency systems like Tor, end-to-end traffic
   correlation attacks [8, 21, 31] allow an attacker who can observe
   both ends of a communication to correlate packet timing and volume,
   quickly linking the initiator to her destination. [4]


[1] "The Dining Cryptographers Problem: Unconditional Sender
Untraceability," D.  Chaum, (invited) Journal of Cryptology, vol. 1
no. 1, 1988, pp. 65-75.
ftp://ftp.csua.berkeley.edu/pub/cypherpunks/papers/chaum.dining.cryptographers.gz
http://www.e-ztown.com/cryptopapers.htm
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/context/143887/0

[2] http://sourceforge.net/projects/mixmaster/.

[3] See usenet newsgroup alt.privacy.anon-server.

[4] http://tor.eff.org/cvs/tor/doc/design-paper/challenges.pdf

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