Analysis of flow-correlation attacks in anonymity network

International Journal of Security and Networks

Volumn 2, Issue 1-2, 2007, Pages 137-153

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

^a Cleveland State University   (United States)

^b DAKOTA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^c TEXAS A AND M UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

anonymous communication; flow correlation attack; mix network

Indexed keywords

EID: 79551551587     PISSN: 17478405     EISSN: 17478413     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1504/ijsn.2007.012831     Document Type: Article

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29. Although Crowds may not use the classical Chaum’s mix, for simplicity, we still use the name of ‘mix’ to refer to a single anonymity network hop, and our theory can be applied to all the rerouting-based anonymity networks.
30. We use an operational definition for ‘low-latency’. We call a communication system low-latency in this context when it does not unduly disrupt TCP connections under normal load conditions. Using this definition, TOR is clearly low-latency.
31. Such a flow can be either a TCP connection or a segment of UDP packets that are part of a VOIP connection, or any other sequence of packets that represent a communication session. In the experiments described later, we are using the traffic from a FTP session as the flow.
32. We tacitly assume that incoming flows are unrelated and thus statistically independent from each other.
33. In the following we will need to distinguish the frequency of an event as sampled from the collected data from the underlying distribution of the same event. We use the notation p for the frequency and p for the underlying distribution. Similarly, we use I to denote the estimated mutual information based on the sampled time series f and l. We denote the actual mutual information based on the underlying distributions as I.
34. The reason for the expansion at the points of the underlying distribution is that the original mutual information is based on the underlying distribution.
35. In the simplified case where there are only two possible outcomes of (a, b), the distribution will be binomial distribution. For the case where there are more than two outcomes, the distribution will be multinomial.
36. f,lM→R1 (a, b). The subscript is removed for the sake of brevity.