A payment scheme for mixes providing anonymity

Franz, Elke; Jerichow, Anja; Wicke, Guntram

doi:10.1007/bfb0053404

Cited by 8 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…The first payment schemes date back to the late nineties, and were proposed for the classical mix-nets [11,12]. More recently, Wendolsky proposed a volume-based accounting system for fixed-route mix cascade systems [19].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Paying the Guard: An Entry-Guard-Based Payment System for Tor

Palmieri

Pouwelse

2015

Financial Cryptography and Data Security

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Abstract. When choosing the three relays that compose a circuit, Tor selects the first hop among a restricted number of relays called entry guards, pre-selected by the user himself. The reduced number of entry guards, that until recently was fixed to three, helps in mitigating the effects of several traffic analysis attacks. However, recent literature indicates that the number should be further reduced, and the time during which the user keeps the relays as guards increased. Therefore, developers of Tor recently proposed selecting only one entry guard, which is to be used by the user for all circuits and for a prolonged period of time (nine months). While this design choice was made to increase the security of the protocol, it also opens an unprecedented opportunity for a market mechanism where relays get paid for traffic by the users. In this paper, we propose to use the entry guard as the point-of-sale: users subscribe to their entry guard of choice, and deposit an amount that will be used for paying for the circuits. From the entry guard, income is then distributed to the other relays included in circuits through an interrelay accounting system. While the user may pay the entry guard using BitCoins, or any other anonymous payment system, the relays exchange I Owe You (IOU) certificates during communication, and settle their balances only at synchronized, later points in time. This novel deferred payment approach overcomes the weaknesses of the previously proposed Tor payment mechanisms: we separate the user's payment from the interrelay payments, and we effectively unlink both from the chosen path, thus preserving the secrecy of the circuit.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Paying the Guard: An Entry-Guard-Based Payment System for Tor

Palmieri

Pouwelse

2015

Financial Cryptography and Data Security

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“…Franz et al [22] introduce an incentive technique for mixnetworks that divides electronic payments for each mix, but is inefficient since each hop requires communication between the mix and mix provider.. Figueiredo et al [21] also introduce an electronic mix-net anonymity system, but it lacks accountability and robustness. Reiter et al [41] build upon coin ripping [29] to develop a strict fair exchange protocol for mix-nets.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Recruiting new tor relays with BRAIDS

Jansen

Hopper

Kim

2010

Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security

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Tor, a distributed Internet anonymizing system, relies on volunteers who run dedicated relays. Other than altruism, these volunteers have no incentive to run relays, causing a large disparity between the number of users and available relays. We introduce BRAIDS, a set of practical mechanisms that encourages users to run Tor relays, allowing them to earn credits redeemable for improved performance of both interactive and non-interactive Tor traffic. These performance incentives will allow Tor to support increasing resource demands with almost no loss in anonymity: BRAIDS is robust to well-known attacks. Using a simulation of 20,300 Tor nodes, we show that BRAIDS allows relays to achieve 75% lower latency than non-relays for interactive traffic, and 90% higher bandwidth utilization for non-interactive traffic.

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“…Incentive mechanisms for mix-nets have been investigated by Franz, et al [18] and Figueiredo et al [16]. Both of them propose to use electronic payment to encourage mixes to behave honestly.…”

Section: Reliability In MIX Networkmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Some incentive mechanisms [16,18] have been proposed for anonymity protocols using digital cash. Unfortunately, they all miss a key issue: fairness in exchange of payment and service.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Building Reliable Mix Networks with Fair Exchange

Reiter

Wright

2005

Applied Cryptography and Network Security

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Abstract. In this paper we present techniques by which each mix in a mix network can be paid for its services by message senders, in a way that ensures fairness and without sacrificing anonymity. We describe a payment mechanism for use in mix networks, and use this payment scheme in fair exchange mechanisms for both connection-based and messagebased mix networks. In connection-based mix networks, our protocols achieve fairness in a weak sense: no player can benefit from stopping the exchange prematurely. In message-based mix networks, by taking advantage of each mix's next-hop neighbor as a rational third party, our exchange protocol guarantees strict fairness between initiators and mixes: either both parties successfully exchange payment and service or neither gains anything.

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A payment scheme for mixes providing anonymity

Cited by 8 publications

References 5 publications

Paying the Guard: An Entry-Guard-Based Payment System for Tor

Paying the Guard: An Entry-Guard-Based Payment System for Tor

Recruiting new tor relays with BRAIDS

Building Reliable Mix Networks with Fair Exchange

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