Lecture

Anonymous Communications: Mix Networks and Tor

Graph Chat

Chat with Graph Search

Ask any question about EPFL courses, lectures, exercises, research, news, etc. or try the example questions below.

DISCLAIMER: The Graph Chatbot is not programmed to provide explicit or categorical answers to your questions. Rather, it transforms your questions into API requests that are distributed across the various IT services officially administered by EPFL. Its purpose is solely to collect and recommend relevant references to content that you can explore to help you answer your questions.

In course

CS-523: Advanced topics on privacy enhancing technologies

This advanced course will provide students with the knowledge to tackle the design of privacy-preserving ICT systems. Students will learn about existing technologies to prect privacy, and how to evaluate the protection they provide. ...

Description

This lecture covers the concept of anonymous communications through mix networks and Tor. It discusses the (n-1) attack, message expiry, heartbeat traffic, Loopix, onion routing, Tor's basic operation, stream tracing attacks, indirect load estimation, website fingerprinting, and the challenges faced by Tor. The instructor emphasizes the importance of privacy beyond content confidentiality, the vulnerability of metadata, and the need to consider various attacks when designing anonymity networks.

Instructors (2)

Carmela González Troncoso

SPRING Lab Our research focuses on building secure and privacy-preserving systems. We aim to develop tools and methodologies to help engineers embedding strong security and privacy guarantees in their designs, as well as techniques that help them to systematically quantifying the information that an adversary can infer from data she may have access to.More information about our activities here: https://spring.epfl.ch/ Teaching & PhD PhD Students Saiid El Hajj Chehade, Eric Jollès, Christian Knabenhans, Boy

Alessandro Chiesa

Alessandro Chiesa is a faculty member in computer science. He conducts research in complexity theory, cryptography, and security, with a focus on the theoretical foundations and practical implementations of cryptographic proofs that are short and easy to verify. He is a co-author of several zkSNARK libraries, and is a co-inventor of the Zerocash protocol. He has co-founded Zcash and StarkWare Industries. He is a recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship (2021), an Okawa Foundation Research Grant (2020), and Google Faculty Research Awards (2018 and 2017). He was included in MIT Technology Review's "35 Innovators Under 35" list in 2018.

Official source

Related concepts (32)

Tor (network)

Tor, short for The Onion Router, is free and open-source software for enabling anonymous communication. It directs Internet traffic via a free, worldwide, volunteer overlay network that consists of more than seven thousand relays. Using Tor makes it more difficult to trace a user's Internet activity. Tor protects personal privacy by concealing a user's location and usage from anyone performing network surveillance or traffic analysis. It protects the user's freedom and ability to communicate confidentially through IP address anonymity using Tor exit nodes.

Onion routing

Onion routing is a technique for anonymous communication over a computer network. In an onion network, messages are encapsulated in layers of encryption, analogous to the layers of an onion. The encrypted data is transmitted through a series of network nodes called "onion routers," each of which "peels" away a single layer, revealing the data's next destination. When the final layer is decrypted, the message arrives at its destination. The sender remains anonymous because each intermediary knows only the location of the immediately preceding and following nodes.

Communication

Communication is usually defined as the transmission of information. The term can also refer to the message itself, or the field of inquiry studying these transmissions, also known as communication studies. The precise definition of communication is disputed. Controversial issues are whether unintentional or failed transmissions are included and whether communication does not just transmit meaning but also create it. Models of communication aim to provide a simplified overview of its main components and their interaction.

Anonymous P2P

An anonymous P2P communication system is a peer-to-peer distributed application in which the nodes, which are used to share resources, or participants are anonymous or pseudonymous. Anonymity of participants is usually achieved by special routing overlay networks that hide the physical location of each node from other participants. Interest in anonymous P2P systems has increased in recent years for many reasons, ranging from the desire to share files without revealing one's network identity and risking litigation to distrust in governments, concerns over mass surveillance and data retention, and lawsuits against bloggers.

Anonymity

Anonymity describes situations where the acting person's identity is unknown. Some writers have argued that namelessness, though technically correct, does not capture what is more centrally at stake in contexts of anonymity. The important idea here is that a person be non-identifiable, unreachable, or untrackable. Anonymity is seen as a technique, or a way of realizing, a certain other values, such as privacy, or liberty.

Related lectures (64)

Technologies for Identity & Anonymity

Explores technologies for identity and anonymity, including e-ID, social media identities, and cryptographic signatures.

Cloud and Aggregation: Security and Privacy

Explores cloud computing, data aggregation, security risks, privacy defenses, and data protection techniques.

Anonymous Communications: Technologies and Challenges

Explores the challenges and technologies of anonymous communications, emphasizing the importance of privacy in modern communication systems.

SwissCovid: Proximity-Tracing App Against COVID-19

Explores the SwissCovid app, a proximity-tracing solution against COVID-19, covering technical aspects, building trust, privacy, security, and collaboration with Google and Apple.

Privacy Technologies: Some Privacy Technologies (part II)