Membership-concealing overlay networks

Vasserman, Eugene Y.; Jansen, Rob; Tyra, James; Hopper, Nicholas; Kim, Yong‐Dae

doi:10.1145/1653662.1653709

Cited by 52 publications

(47 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…Some systems protect even the act of participation of nodes in the decentralized network from outside observers ("unobservability" [121] if the items of interest is the existence of users). In addition to more well-known work like Tor pluggable transports [122], the Membership Concealing Overlay Network (MCON) [157] leverages this to provide strong forms of covertness. All nodes in MCON only have links with trusted friends, and a complex overlay network is jointly created that allows all nodes to communicate indirectly with all nodes.…”

Section: How Does Decentralization Support Privacy?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Systematizing Decentralization and Privacy: Lessons from 15 Years of Research and Deployments

Troncoso

Isaakidis

Danezis

et al. 2017

Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies

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Decentralized systems are a subset of distributed systems where multiple authorities control different components and no authority is fully trusted by all. This implies that any component in a decentralized system is potentially adversarial. We revise fifteen years of research on decentralization and privacy, and provide an overview of key systems, as well as key insights for designers of future systems. We show that decentralized designs can enhance privacy, integrity, and availability but also require careful trade-offs in terms of system complexity, properties provided, and degree of decentralization. These trade-offs need to be understood and navigated by designers. We argue that a combination of insights from cryptography, distributed systems, and mechanism design, aligned with the development of adequate incentives, are necessary to build scalable and successful privacy-preserving decentralized systems.

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Section: How Does Decentralization Support Privacy?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Systematizing Decentralization and Privacy: Lessons from 15 Years of Research and Deployments

Troncoso

Isaakidis

Danezis

et al. 2017

Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies

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“…Their results indicate that existing attacks may expose clients to additional privacy risks and Tor exit routers should be treated as sharing a single IP prefix that is mentioned in the bridge design [19]. Vasserman et al [3] presented attacks against Tor bridges and discussed countermeasures using DHT-based overlay networks. Bauer et al [28] showed that an adversary who controlls only 6 malicious Tor routers can compromise over 46% of all clients' circuits in an experimental Tor network with 66 total routers.…”

Section: B Bridge Discovery Via Tor Middle Routersmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, our work and related work [3], [4] have shown two categories of bridge-discovery approaches: (i) enumeration of bridges via bulk email and Tor's https server, and (ii) use of malicious middle routers to discover bridges, which may pick up a malicious middle router as the second hop of a Tor routing path. Tor almost completely fails in China and we believe the Great Firewall of China may have blocked Tor bridges using these approaches as well as blocking all public Tor routers.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We conducted a comprehensive theoretical analysis of two bridge-discovery strategies and our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of large-scale bridge discovery in real-world environments. Although there is related work on discovering bridges [3], [4], the discussion is very limited and there are no formal analysis and large scale experiments as we conducted in this paper. The contributions of this paper are summarized as follows.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Extensive analysis and large-scale empirical evaluation of tor bridge discovery

Ling

Luo

et al. 2012

2012 Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM

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Abstract-Tor is a well-known low-latency anonymous communication system that is able to bypass Internet censorship. However, publicly announced Tor routers are being blocked by various parties. To counter this blocking, Tor introduced nonpublic bridges as the first-hop relay into its core network. In this paper, we analyzed the effectiveness of two categories of bridgediscovery approaches: (i) enumerating bridges from bridge https and email servers, and (ii) inferring bridges by malicious Tor middle routers. Large-scale experiments were conducted and validated our theoretic analysis. We discovered 2365 Tor bridges through the two enumeration approaches and 2369 bridges by only one Tor middle router in 14 days. The malicious middle router based bridge discovery approach is simple, incurs little overhead, can discover bridges distributed by any approach, and is efficient and effective. We also discussed countermeasures to the malicious bridge discovery.

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“…Discussion To analyze our system, we obtain the growth rate of Tor relays from [50]. We estimate the client growth rate by analyzing how the number of client connections to a relay changes over a two month experiment [55]. We apply these rates and the estimated network size of 100,000 clients and 1,500 relays to find the total network size over time.…”

Section: Security Analysismentioning

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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Membership-concealing overlay networks

Cited by 52 publications

References 30 publications

Systematizing Decentralization and Privacy: Lessons from 15 Years of Research and Deployments

Systematizing Decentralization and Privacy: Lessons from 15 Years of Research and Deployments

Extensive analysis and large-scale empirical evaluation of tor bridge discovery

Recruiting new tor relays with BRAIDS

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