Abstract
Today’s society has a fundamental need for security and anonymity. Well suited, real-life scenarios such as whistleblower reports, intelligence service operations, and the ability to communicate within oppressive governments, call for such fundamental needs. The contribution and focus of this paper is the study of anonymous communications in the context of Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs). Current literature achieves anonymity via mechanisms that are built around the onion routing paradigm which, unfortunately, is vulnerable to malicious nodes. Instead, our work introduces a novel message forwarding algorithm that delivers messages, from source to destination, via a random walk process. As such, our protocol does not list the intermediate nodes along the route’s path and, therefore, enhances significantly the anonymity of the underlying communications. We propose two different approaches for encrypting the exchanged messages. The first one is based solely on public key cryptosystems and is, thus, suitable for short, SMS-style messaging. The second one is a hybrid solution that combines both public and symmetric key cryptography and is targeted towards large multimedia messages, such as images or video. Through extensive simulation experiments, we show that our proposed anonymous routing protocol achieves high message delivery rates, while using modest computational resources on the mobile devices.
Highlights
The advancement of cybersecurity education and the ability to leverage high-tech vulnerability assessment, penetration testing, and software exploitation tools, have turned privacy breaches into commonplace events
In our earlier work [12], we designed a protocol that relies exclusively on public key cryptography. It is only suitable for the exchange of short messages that can fit into a few ciphertexts, because every message has to be re-randomized at each forwarding step. (Note that, rerandomization is expensive for public key ciphertexts.) In this paper, we extend our basic protocol and introduce a hybrid solution where (i) the message is encrypted with a symmetric cipher and (ii) the symmetric keys used for message rerandomization are communicated via public key ciphertexts
We conducted a thorough experimental evaluation of our methods using real-life datasets, and our results indicate that the proposed forwarding algorithm attains high message delivery rates, while using only modest computational resources at the mobile devices
Summary
The advancement of cybersecurity education and the ability to leverage high-tech vulnerability assessment, penetration testing, and software exploitation tools, have turned privacy breaches into commonplace events. She first selects three random Tor servers (from a public list) and encrypts her message recursively, using the public keys of the selected nodes. All nodes are split into groups, and the source node selects a set of groups that the message has to traverse before reaching the destination These schemes employ a trusted key generator that generates the VOLUME 8, 2020. This is a major security risk that implies a tremendous amount of trust on the security of the third-party key generator To this end, our work abandons the standard onion routing paradigm and, instead, proposes a novel distributed approach to anonymous communications.
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