[Cryptography] Quality & Privacy

[Per Kangru]

Hello fellows of Cryptography,

I have for some time been considering the fine balance between being able
to provide private and secure communication between several end points with
the ability for the network operator to in a reasonable way understand if
the end customer is having a good or bad experience from the communication
service offered.

Much research have shown that it is readily possible to identify specific
user behaviors and with a relatively high likelihood what webpages they
where downloading by looking at patterns of the encrypted data (see for
example: Cheng and Avnur, Traffic Analysis of SSL Encrypted Web Browsing
<https://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~daw/teaching/.../ronathan-heyning.ps>).
Obviously defenses are available against this but it would in general
require overhead traffic and as it shown does not fully protect against
this analysis still.

Regardless of the specifics of the data being downloaded or accessed I
would like to understand if the folks here are aware of any relevant
research that is focused on identifying specific parameters related to
quality of the communication and how this is 'leaked' outside of the
encrypted tunnel, for example patterns of TCP retransmissions or TCP
connection resets etc.

I would appreciate any pointers to material to further study this as much
of the current literature is focused on either figuring out what is sent
inside the the encrypted tunnel for either traffic policy enforcement or
IDS purposed or identifying end points for the communication and I have so
far found limited material related to understanding the QoS parameters of
the traffic.


Regards,

Per

-- 
Per Kangru
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/attachments/20150528/8c8a5f20/attachment.html>