Correlation-based traffic analysis attacks on anonymity networks

IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems

Volumn 21, Issue 7, 2010, Pages 954-967

  Zhu, Ye ^a   Fu, Xinwen ^b   Graham, Bryan ^c   Bettati, Riccardo ^c   Zhao, Wei ^d  

^a Cleveland State University   (United States)

^b DAKOTA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^c TEXAS A AND M UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^d UNIVERSITY OF MACAU   (Macao)

Author keywords

Anonymity; Anonymous communication; Flow correlation attack; Mixes; Privacy

Indexed keywords

CORRELATION METHODS; DATA PRIVACY; FREQUENCY DOMAIN ANALYSIS; MIXING;

ANONYMITY; ANONYMITY NETWORKS; ANONYMOUS COMMUNICATION; ANONYMOUS COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS; FLOW CORRELATION; FREQUENCY-DOMAIN METHODS; TIME-DOMAIN METHODS; TRAFFIC ANALYSIS ATTACKS;

TIME DOMAIN ANALYSIS;

EID: 77953123409     PISSN: 10459219     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1109/TPDS.2009.146     Document Type: Article

References (46)

1. D. Chaum, "Untraceable Electronic Mail, Return Addresses, and Digital Pseudonyms," Comm. ACM, vol.24, no.2, pp. 84-90, Feb. 1981.
2. A. Serjantov and G. Danezis, "Towards an Information Theoretic Metric for Anonymity," Proc. Privacy Enhancing Technologies Workshop (PET '02), R. Dingledine and P. Syverson, eds., pp. 41- 53, Apr. 2002.
3. C. Díaz, S. Seys, J. Claessens, and B. Preneel, "Towards Measuring Anonymity," Proc. Privacy Enhancing Technologies Workshop (PET '02), R. Dingledine and P. Syverson, eds., pp. 54- 68, Apr. 2002.
4. Y. Zhu and R. Bettati, "Anonymity vs. Information Leakage in Anonymity Systems," Proc. 25th IEEE Int'l Conf. Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS '05), pp. 514-524, 2005.
5. O.R.D. Achives, "Link Padding and the Intersection Attack," http://archives.seul.org/or/dev, 2002.
6. P.F. Syverson, D.M. Goldschlag, and M.G. Reed, "Anonymous Connections and Onion Routing," Proc. IEEE Symp. Security and Privacy, pp. 44-54, 1997.
7. P. Boucher, A. Shostack, and I. Goldberg, "Freedom Systems 2.0 Architecture," http://www.freedom.net/products/whitepapers /Freedom-System-2-Architecture.pdf, Dec. 2000.
8. R. Dingledine, N. Mathewson, and P. Syverson, "Tor: The Second- Generation Onion Router," Proc. 13th USENIX Security Symp., pp. 303-320, Aug. 2004.
9. M.K. Reiter and A.D. Rubin, "Crowds: Anonymity for Web Transactions," ACM Trans. Information and System Security, vol.1, no.1, pp. 66-92, 1998.
10. M.J. Freedman and R. Morris, "Tarzan: A Peer-to-Peer Anonymizing Network Layer," Proc. Ninth ACM Conf. Computer and Comm. Security, pp. 193-206, 2002.
11. M. Rennhard and B. Plattner, "Introducing MorphMix: Peer-to- Peer Based Anonymous Internet Usage with Collusion Detection," Proc. ACM Workshop Privacy in the Electronic Soc. (WPES '02), pp. 91-102, 2002.
12. R. Sherwood, B. Bhattacharjee, and A. Srinivasan, "p5: A Protocol for Scalable Anonymous Communication," Proc. IEEE Symp. Security and Privacy, pp. 58-70, May 2002.
13. Q. Sun, D.R. Simon, Y.-M. Wang, W. Russell, V.N. Padmanabhan, and L. Qiu, "Statistical Identification of Encrypted Web Browsing Traffic," Proc. IEEE Symp. Security and Privacy, pp. 19-30, 2002.
14. A. Serjantov and P. Sewell, "Passive Attack Analysis for Connection- Based Anonymity Systems," Proc. European Symp. Research in Computer Security (ESORICS '03), pp. 116-131, Oct. 2003.
15. M. Wright, M. Adler, B.N. Levine, and C. Shields, "Defending Anonymous Communications against Passive Logging Attacks," Proc. IEEE Symp. Security and Privacy (SP '03), pp. 28-41, May 2003.
16. B.N. Levine, M.K. Reiter, C. Wang, and M.K. Wright, "Timing Attacks in Low-Latency Mix-Based Systems," Proc. Financial Cryptography Conf. (FC '04), pp. 251-265, Feb. 2004.
17. S.J. Murdoch and G. Danezis, "Low-Cost Traffic Analysis of Tor," Proc. 2005 IEEE Symp. Security and Privacy, pp. 183-195, May 2005.
18. G. Danezis, "The Traffic Analysis of Continuous-Time Mixes," Proc. Privacy Enhancing Technologies Workshop (PET '04), pp. 35-50, May 2004.
19. L. Øverlier and P. Syverson, "Locating Hidden Servers," Proc. IEEE Symp. Security and Privacy, May 2006.
20. L. Øverlier and P. Syverson, "Valet Services: Improving Hidden Servers with a Personal Touch," Proc. Sixth Workshop Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET '06), G. Danezis and P. Golle, eds., pp. 223-244, June 2006.
21. D. Kesdogan, D. Agrawal, V. Pham, and D. Rautenbach, "Fundamental Limits on the Anonymity Provided by the Mix Technique," Proc. IEEE Symp. Security and Privacy (SP), pp. 86-99, 2006.
22. J. Camenisch and A. Lysyanskaya, "A Formal Treatment of Onion Routing," Proc. Ann. Int'l Cryptology Conf. (CRYPTO '05), V. Shoup, ed., pp. 169-187, Aug. 2005.
23. Y. Zhang and V. Paxson, "Detecting Stepping Stones," Proc. Ninth Conf. USENIX Security Symp. (SSYM '00), pp. 13-13, 2000.
24. X. Wang and D.S. Reeves, "Robust Correlation of Encrypted Attack Traffic through Stepping Stones by Manipulation of Interpacket Delays," Proc. 10th ACM Conf. Computer and Comm. Security (CCS '03), pp. 20-29, 2003.
25. Y.J. Pyun, Y.H. Park, X. Wang, D.S. Reeves, and P. Ning, "Tracing Traffic through Intermediate Hosts that Repacketize Flows," Proc. 26th IEEE INFOCOM '07, pp. 634-642, May 2007.
26. K. Suh, D.R. Figueiredo, J. Kurose, and D. Towsley, "Characterizing and Detecting Skype-Relayed Traffic," Proc. 25th IEEE INFOCOM '06, pp. 1-12, Apr. 2006.
27. Y. Zhu, X. Fu, and R. Bettati, "On the Effectiveness of Continuous- Time Mixes under Flow Correlation Attacks," Technical Report TR2005-2-6, Texas A&M Univ. Computer Science, 2005.
28. Y. Zhu, X. Fu, R. Bettati, and W. Zhao, "Anonymity Analysis of Mix Networks against Flow-Correlation Attacks," Proc. IEEE GLOBECOM '05, vol.3, pp. 1801-1805, 2005.
29. G. Danezis, R. Dingledine, and N. Mathewson, "Mixminion: Design of a Type III Anonymous Remailer Protocol," Proc. 2003 IEEE Symp. Security and Privacy, pp. 2-15, May 2003.
30. A. Serjantov, R. Dingledine, and P. Syverson, "From a Trickle to a Flood: Active Attacks on Several Mix Types," Proc. Information Hiding Workshop (IH '02), F. Petitcolas, ed., pp. 36-52, Oct. 2002.
31. X. Fu, B. Graham, R. Bettati, W. Zhao, and D. Xuan, "Analytical and Empirical Analysis of Countermeasures to Traffic Analysis Attacks," Proc. 32nd Int'l Conf. Parallel Processing (ICPP '03), pp. 483-492, Oct. 2003.
32. D.X. Song, D. Wagner, and X. Tian, "Timing Analysis of Keystrokes and Timing Attacks on SSH," Proc. 10th USENIX Security Symp., pp. 337-352, 2001.
33. J.D. Howard, "An Analysis of Security Incidents on the Internet 1989-1995," CMU dissertation, Technical Report, 1997.
34. F.B.I, "Carnivore Diagnostic Tool," http://www.fbi.gov/hq/lab/ carnivore/carnivore2.htm, 2003.
35. tcpdump.org, "tcpdump," http://www.tcpdump.org/, 2003.
36. cisco.inc., "Netflow Services Solutions Guide," http://www.cisco. com/univercd/cc/td/doc/cisintwk/intsolns/netflsol/nfwhite. htm, 2003.
37. R. Moddemeijer, "On Estimation of Entropy and Mutual Information of Continuous Distributions," Signal Processing, vol.16, no.3, pp. 233-246, 1989.
38. S.-q. Li and J.D. Pruneski, "The Linearity of Low Frequency Traffic Flow: An Intrinsic I/O Property in Queueing Systems," IEEE/ ACM Trans. Networking, vol.5, no.3, pp. 429-443, June 1997.
39. [39] netfilter.org, "Netfilter," http://netfilter.samba.org/, 2003.
40. TimeSys, "Timesys Linux Docs," http://www.timesys.com/, 2003.
41. M. Carson and D. Santay, "Nist Net: A Linux-Based Network Emulation Tool," ACM SIGCOMM Computer Comm. Rev., vol.33, no.3, http://portal.acm. org/citation.cfm?id=956993.957007, pp. 111-126, July 2003.
42. K. Park and W. Willinger, "Self-Similar Network Traffic: An Overview," citeseer.ist.psu.edu/park99selfsimilar.html, 1999.
43. A.V. Oppenheim, A.S. Willsky, and S.H. Nawab, Signals and Systems, second ed. Prentice-Hall, 1997.
44. S. Floyd and K. Fall, "Promoting the Use of End-to-End Congestion Control in the Internet," IEEE/ACM Trans. Networking, vol.7, no.4, pp. 458-472, Aug. 1999.
45. J. Padhye, V. Firoiu, D.F. Towsley, and J.F. Kurose, "Modeling TCP Throughput: A Simple Model and its Empirical Validation," Proc. ACM SIGCOMM '98, pp. 303-314, 1998.
46. K. Fall and S. Floyd, "Simulation-Based Comparisons of Tahoe, Reno and SACK TCP," SIGCOMM Computer Comm. Rev., vol.26, no.3, pp. 5-21, Aug. 1996.