Anonymous communication and its importance in social networking

Hoang, Nguyen Phong; Pishva, Davar

doi:10.1109/icact.2014.6778917

Cited by 27 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 2 publications

(2 reference statements)

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“…Note that our proposal does not aim to anonymize a given user's browsing activities by decoupling the link between users and their DNS queries, which is not the original purpose of DoH/DoT either. For anonymous DNS resolutions, users may use anonymous communication systems to route their DNS traffic [15]. For instance, DNS-over-HTTPSover-Tor is one of the more complicated methods to secure DNS traffic, which has been already implemented by Cloudflare [40].…”

Section: Threat Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

K-resolver: Towards Decentralizing Encrypted DNS Resolution

Hoang¹,

Lin²,

Ghavamnia³

et al. 2020

Proceedings 2020 Workshop on Measurements, Attacks, and Defenses for the Web

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Centralized DNS over HTTPS/TLS (DoH/DoT) resolution, which has started being deployed by major hosting providers and web browsers, has sparked controversy among Internet activists and privacy advocates due to several privacy concerns. This design decision causes the trace of all DNS resolutions to be exposed to a third-party resolver, different than the one specified by the user's access network. In this work we propose K-resolver, a DNS resolution mechanism that disperses DNS queries across multiple DoH resolvers, reducing the amount of information about a user's browsing activity exposed to each individual resolver. As a result, none of the resolvers can learn a user's entire web browsing history. We have implemented a prototype of our approach for Mozilla Firefox, and used it to evaluate the performance of web page load time compared to the default centralized DoH approach. While our K-resolver mechanism has some effect on DNS resolution time and web page load time, we show that this is mainly due to the geographical location of the selected DoH servers. When more well-provisioned anycast servers are available, our approach incurs negligible overhead while improving user privacy.

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Section: Threat Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

K-resolver: Towards Decentralizing Encrypted DNS Resolution

Hoang¹,

Lin²,

Ghavamnia³

et al. 2020

Proceedings 2020 Workshop on Measurements, Attacks, and Defenses for the Web

Self Cite

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“…For this reason, anonymous communication has drawn attention from both researchers and Internet users [10,13,42,46,69,71,74]. As anonymous communication networks grow to support more users, more anonymity and censorship circumvention tools are becoming freely available [23]. Some of these tools include proxy servers, Virtual Private Network (VPN) services, the Onion Router (Tor) [10], and the Invisible Internet Project (I2P) [74].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Empirical Study of the I2P Anonymity Network and its Censorship Resistance

Hoang

Kintis

Antonakakis

et al. 2018

Proceedings of the Internet Measurement Conference 2018

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Tor and I2P are well-known anonymity networks used by many individuals to protect their online privacy and anonymity. Tor's centralized directory services facilitate the understanding of the Tor network, as well as the measurement and visualization of its structure through the Tor Metrics project. In contrast, I2P does not rely on centralized directory servers, and thus obtaining a complete view of the network is challenging. In this work, we conduct an empirical study of the I2P network, in which we measure properties including population, churn rate, router type, and the geographic distribution of I2P peers. We find that there are currently around 32K active I2P peers in the network on a daily basis. Of these peers, 14K are located behind NAT or firewalls.Using the collected network data, we examine the blocking resistance of I2P against a censor that wants to prevent access to I2P using address-based blocking techniques. Despite the decentralized characteristics of I2P, we discover that a censor can block more than 95% of peer IP addresses known by a stable I2P client by operating only 10 routers in the network. This amounts to severe network impairment: a blocking rate of more than 70% is enough to cause significant latency in web browsing activities, while blocking more than 90% of peer IP addresses can make the network unusable. Finally, we discuss the security consequences of the network being blocked, and directions for potential approaches to make I2P more resistant to blocking.

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“…This solution has multiple encryption layers and employs asymmetric cryptography. Later, professional attackers pointed out certain vulnerabilities of TOR at exit node; As a solution, TOR uses dynamic IP address to prevent continuous monitoring of exit node [1] Many works have employed trust in social networks to enhance system anonymity, one of the earlier approaches is [6], which uses personal digital certificates issued by a trusted certificate authority. Then, it applies certain technique such as idemix to make the certificates anonymous, un-linkable, and non-transferable.…”

Section: ) Identity In Social Networkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Virtual Identity Approaches Evaluation for Anonymous Communication in Cloud Environments

Gomaa¹,

Abd-Elrahman²,

Abid³

2016

ijacsa

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Abstract-Since the era of Cloud computing beginning, the Identity Management is considered as a permanent challenge especially for the hybrid IT environments that permit for many users' applications to share the same data center depending on servers' virtualization. This paper introduces a complete study about Identity forms in different domains and applications. Also, a performance evaluation of new approaches for Virtual Identity was done. Virtual Identity, a new terminology used in virtual environments, was introduced to enhance the anonymous communication in such types of complex networks. Based on the work analysis and motivations done through an online survey, two techniques were used to implement the Virtual Identity; Identity Based Encryption (IBE) and Pseudonym Based Encryption (PBE). Both techniques were validated using MIRACL library for security algorithms. In addition, the performance of both approaches was evaluated under different configurations and network conditions through OPNET Modeler. The results showed the impact of the number of cloud users and their locations (either local or remote) on the application response time in cloud environments using the proposed virtual identities. Moreover, Application Characterization Environment whiteboard was used to simulate the overall flow of data across different tiers from start to end of the application task for Virtual Identity creation. The results and outcomes for both methodologies showed that they are suitable paradigm for achieving high degree of security and efficiency in such sophisticated network access to many online services and applications.

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Anonymous communication and its importance in social networking

Cited by 27 publications

References 2 publications

K-resolver: Towards Decentralizing Encrypted DNS Resolution

K-resolver: Towards Decentralizing Encrypted DNS Resolution

An Empirical Study of the I2P Anonymity Network and its Censorship Resistance

Virtual Identity Approaches Evaluation for Anonymous Communication in Cloud Environments

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