Anonymous end-to-end communications in adversarial mobile clouds

Abstract

Today’s mobile devices have changed the way we interact with technology. Internet, cloud access, online banking, instant messaging, and file exchange through the cloud are just a handful of the myriad of smartphone services that we make use of every day. At the same time, the very enablers of these services–mobile internet providers and cloud platforms that host them–pose several threats to the anonymity of our communications. In this paper, we consider the problem of providing end-to-end anonymous communications and file exchange under the cooperative privacy threat of involved parties including network operators and cloud providers, which actively tamper with the communication. We propose a solution for delay-tolerant applications (similar to Whatsapp or Email) and prove the security properties of the protocol under this strong attack model. Finally, we present an experimental analysis of the efficiency of our protocol in terms of performance overhead.