Anonymous Communication Research Articles

Evaluative study of an anonymous communication architecture for web browsing using SBC devices

The digital world brought many benefits and risks for users, consequently the need arises to protect the user's privacy while browsing the web, this article describes the evaluative study of the elements that are part of the architecture of a composite prototype by an SBC device and anonymity software that allows the user to keep their identity anonymous while browsing the web, initially, studies were carried out to determine which areas of communication to protect, which is the appropriate software for the architecture and which device to use for the prototype, additionally the corresponding performance tests to the prototype were carried out, in addition to the security tests based on the OWASP IoT project; Finally, the prototype developed allows anonymity by browsing from the operating system on the SBC device and also shares that anonymity through a Wi-Fi network so that users or external devices can connect.

Digital Right Protection Principles under Digitalization

The article deals with the main principles of protecting digital rights – a new legal category – in the digital environment. In the context of the rapid development of information and communication technologies when cyberspace becomes the platform for interaction between citizens, society, and the state, there is a need to re-evaluate traditional approaches to rights exercised through digital communications on the Internet. The purpose of the study is to examine the legal features and properties of digital rights and identify the principles for protecting digital rights online. The authors employ the general scientific dialectical method as well as the formal legal, systemic structural, and formal logical cognition methods. The synergetic method is used to identify the features and properties of digital rights, this method helps to highlight new rules and new realities in the creative potential of chaos. The authors conclude that the scope of digital legal relations has the characteristics of cross-border and virtuality, thus ensuring the protection of digital rights should be carried out considering the special properties of this environment in which subjects cannot always be identified, and objects are characterized as simulations. Digital rights are obligations and other rights, the content and the exercise of which are determined by their specific features according to the rules and functioning principles of the information and telecommunication system. The holder of a digital right can be a person who can exercise the right. The authors identify the basic principles of protecting digital rights: the digital equality principle; the digital self-determination principle; the anonymous communication principle; the principle of confidentiality of private communications; the principle of privacy in the digital environment; the principle of secrecy of digital identification; the principle of security of data obtained through facial recognition technologies; the principle of erasure of digitalized personal information.

Tor Hidden Services: A Systematic Literature Review

Anonymous communications networks were created to protect the privacy of communications, preventing censorship and traffic analysis. The most famous anonymous communication network is Tor. This anonymous communication network provides some interesting features. Among them, we can mention that Tor can hide a user’s IP address when accessing to a service such as the Web, and it also supports Tor hidden services (THS) (now named onion services) as a mechanism to conceal the server’s IP address, used mainly to provide anonymity to websites. THS is an important research field in Tor. However, there is a lack of reviews that sum up the main findings and research challenges. In this article, we present a systematic literature review that aims to offer a comprehensive overview of the research made on THS by presenting the state-of-the-art and the different research challenges to be addressed. This review has been developed from a selection of 57 articles and presents main findings and advances regarding Tor hidden services, limitations found, and future issues to be investigated.

Introduction: digital cultures and acts of refusal, secrecy and power across privacy-enhancing technologies

The Dark Social: Online Practices of Resistance, Motility and Power explores the way that users engage online by managing the capacity for anonymous communication in encrypted, hidden, or otherwise...

Construction of a Chaotic Map-Based Authentication Protocol for TMIS.

Upgraded network technology presents an advanced technological platform for telecare medicine information systems (TMIS) for patients. However, TMIS generally suffers various attacks since the information being shared through the insecure channel. Recently, many authentication techniques have been proposed relying on the chaotic map. However, many of these designs are not secure against the known attacks. In spite of the fact that some of the constructions attain low computation overhead, they cannot establish an anonymous communication and many of them fail to ensure forward secrecy. In this work, our aim is to present authentication and key agreement protocol for TMIS utilizing a chaotic map to achieve both security and efficiency. The underlying security assumptions are chaotic theory assumptions. This scheme supports forward secrecy and a secure session is established with just two messages of exchange. Moreover, we present a comparative analysis of related authentication techniques.

FEATURES OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS AND TECHNOLOGIES OF PUBLIC MANAGEMENT AND ADMINISTRATION IN THE CONTEXT OF EUROPEAN INTEGRATION PROCESSES

The article updates the importance of using modern information systems and technologies of public administration and administration in the context of European integration processes. It has been substantiated that the efficiency of the work of authorities at all levels is largely determined by the quality and efficiency of their information and analytical services. The essential-meaningful characteristic of the information system of public administration and administration has been determined by generalizing the views of domestic and foreign scientists. The structure of the information system was defined through the allocation of four main components: means of fixing and collecting information; means of transmitting the relevant data and messages; information storage means; means of analysis, processing and presentation of information. The directions of the functioning of interconnected information systems that ensure electronic interaction of public authorities of different countries in the context of digitalization and globalization of socio-economic relations with representatives of business structures and civil society, allowing to form elements of the "virtual community" and "digital power" as transformed forms of public administration were characterized. Among them are: free movement of information data; expansion of forms of audiovisual communication through the development of modern computer technology; interactivity of modern media tools used in the public administration system; anonymity of collective and individual communication on the Internet; the rapid dissemination of information using modern communications; modern means of forming and transmitting information. The technology of information exchange in the information system of public management and administration in the context of globalization and eurointegration has been formalized. The advantages of information technologies in public administration for the implementation of socio-economic cooperation projects is highlighted, including: creating conditions for the availability of information on significant economic and social issues; strengthening the level of mutual trust in society; strengthening feedback between state and public subjects of public administration relations; creation of innovative forms of public participation in public administration; the formation of sources of transparency in the actions of interacting institutions; ensuring productivity growth of e-government while reducing time and labor costs in information processing and decision-making.

Obfuscated Tor Traffic Identification Based on Sliding Window

Tor is an anonymous communication network used to hide the identities of both parties in communication. Apart from those who want to browse the web anonymously using Tor for a benign purpose, criminals can use Tor for criminal activities. It is recognized that Tor is easily intercepted by the censorship mechanism, so it uses a series of obfuscation mechanisms to avoid censorship, such as Meek, Format-Transforming Encryption (FTE), and Obfs4. In order to detect Tor traffic, we collect three kinds of obfuscated Tor traffic and then use a sliding window to extract 12 features from the stream according to the five-tuple, including the packet length, packet arrival time interval, and the proportion of the number of bytes sent and received. And finally, we use XGBoost, Random Forest, and other machine learning algorithms to identify obfuscated Tor traffic and its types. Our work provides a feasible method for countering obfuscated Tor network, which can identify the three kinds of obfuscated Tor traffic and achieve about 99% precision rate and recall rate.

Fast hybrid-MixNet for security and privacy using NTRU algorithm

Security and privacy-enhancing techniques are developed in order to provide strong protection over the Internet. These techniques aim to enable the users to keep their identities secret during the communication when they are forwarding an email, making payments online, and web browsing or posting to newsgroups. MixNet is the most practical solution for concealing the identities of messages and senders. The anonymous channel contains numerous routing protocols that consist of anonymous messages forwarding between nodes. The structure of MixNet is also based on this way to achieve anonymity. After the proposed work of Chaumian MixNet, many practical implementations of MixNet using many approaches and techniques are accomplished until now. In this paper, we propose the hybrid MixNet using NTRU asymmetric cryptosystem. We designed a mechanism for anonymous communication in which more people can participate in their secure communication. It hides the relation between input and output in each phase of Mix servers. The performance of Hybrid MixNet using NTRU is better than Hybrid Mixnet using ElGamal and ECC. In our proposed system, Hybrid MixNet using NTRU takes average time 16.4 milliseconds while Hybrid MixNet using ElGamal and ECC take 93.4 milliseconds and 182.2 milliseconds respectively.

UDM: Private user discovery with minimal information disclosure

We present and analyze User Discovery with Minimal information disclosure (UDM), a new protocol for user discovery in anonymous communication systems that minimizes the information disclosed to the system and users. UDM solves the following user-discovery problem. User Alice wishes to communicate with Bob over an anonymous communication system, such as cMix or Tor. Initially, each party knows each other’s public contact identifier (e.g., email address or phone number), but neither knows the other’s private platform identifier in the communication system. If both parties wish to communicate with each other, UDM enables them to establish a shared secret and learn each other’s private platform identifier. Unlike existing systems, including those based on private set intersection, UDM learns nothing about the social contacts of the users, is not vulnerable to off-line dictionary attacks that expose contact lists, does not reveal platform identifiers to users without the owner’s explicit permission, and enjoys low computation and communication complexity. Using the anonymous communication system, each pair of users who wish to communicate with each other uploads to the user-discovery system their private platform identifier, encrypted with a key derived from their shared secret. Indexing their request by a cryptographic tag derived from their shared secret, each user can then download each other’s encrypted private platform identifier. In doing so, UDM uses an untrusted user-discovery system, which processes and stores only public information or values encrypted with keys it does not know. Therefore, from the data values it processes, UDM cannot learn any information about the social contacts of its users.

LacminCC: lightweight anonymous communication model in cloud computing

With increasing application of cloud computing and big data technologies, a large amount of personal information is stored on the Internet, which raises the issue of privacy leakage. To protect people’s data privacy, this paper firstly presents a new anonymous Identify-Based Encryption (IBE) scheme and gives the proof of its security under the Bilinear Diffie–Hellman Security Assumption. Then, by introducing the anonymous IBE scheme into anonymous communication fields, this paper introduces a new lightweight anonymous communication model for cloud computing, which guarantees the anonymity of system users and the security of messages in small groups. Our analysis shows that, the proposed communication model cannot only reduce memory consumption and improve message transmission efficiency, but also effectively resist traffic-analysis attacks, node eavesdropping, and finally achieve secure anonymous communication in cloud computing.

A Traitor-Resistant and Dynamic Anonymous Communication Service for Cloud-Based VANETs

Cloud-based VANETs are designed to enable communication between high-speed vehicles. In such a highly dynamic environment, how to provide secure and anonymous communication service is a challenge. In this article, we affirmatively address the challenge by proposing a traitor-resistant and dynamic anonymous communication framework (TD-ACF) for cloud-based VANETs, which supports several advantageous features. In TD-ACF, each vehicle is represented by a set of attributes instead of its real identity, and the driving data is transmitted in encrypted form. Therefore, the anonymous authentication and the confidentiality of driving data are achieved in this way. Meanwhile, TD-ACF supports two practical requirements in cloud-based VANETs: the revocation and the traceability of traitor. For the former, TD-ACF can force a vehicle to exit the communication network at any moment. We employ an efficient binary tree algorithm to reduce the size of key updates for revocation from the traditional linear to the logarithmic level. For the latter, we overcome the barrier of the one-to-many relationship between a vehicle and the shared set of attributes to support traitor tracing. In TD-ACF, unlike most existing schemes, the Semi-Trusted Cloud (STC) can directly capture and punish a traitor instead of querying all the records in the list of unrevoked vehicles. In addition, we solve the key escrow problem that plagues most existing attribute-based schemes. The theoretical analysis and experimental simulation show that the proposed scheme is feasible and effective.

Survey of anonymous communication system

Survey of anonymous communication system

An anonymity communication protocol for security and privacy of clients in IoT-based mobile health transactions

Mobile Health (mHealth) technology facilitates patients’ care and decreases healthcare costs by remotely monitoring healthcare processes and medical data management. Nonetheless, there are many concerns regarding the security, privacy, and anonymity of the mHealth transactions. Conventionally, privacy includes anonymity, untraceability, unlinkability, unforgeability, and confidentiality. Transactions’ confidentiality can be easily protected using confidential transaction techniques. However, anonymity, untraceability, unlinkability, and unforgeability properties are quite challenging issues in healthcare transactions. This paper proposes a UDP-based anonymous protocol for mHealth transactions to protect the security of data and privacy of clients’ identities. In this work, we aim to investigate utilizing one of the best anonymity solutions, onion structure (onion encryption, onion routing, and onion network), with blockchain smart contracts upon the UDP platform to make a protocol for transferring data in IoT-based mHealth applications. In the proposed protocol, every malicious client who sends false data can be easily detected using an identity disclosure process. In this way, mHealth clients, without exchanging sensitive identities, can establish an authorized connection and be protected against different kinds of attacks. According to our experimental results and security/privacy proofs, the proposed protocol has an acceptable computational cost and security protections for IoT-based mHealth transactions.

A Systems Approach Toward Addressing Anonymous Abuses: Technical and Policy Considerations

Can we prevent the abuses of anonymous communication networks without affecting their ability to enhance privacy and evade censorship? We evaluate approaches for balancing the need for anonymity with the desire to mitigate anonymous abuses.

An Efficient Anonymous Communication Scheme to Protect the Privacy of the Source Node Location in the Internet of Things

Advances in machine learning (ML) in recent years have enabled a dizzying array of applications such as data analytics, autonomous systems, and security diagnostics. As an important part of the Internet of Things (IoT), wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been widely used in military, transportation, medical, and household fields. However, in the applications of wireless sensor networks, the adversary can infer the location of a source node and an event by backtracking attacks and traffic analysis. The location privacy leakage of a source node has become one of the most urgent problems to be solved in wireless sensor networks. To solve the problem of source location privacy leakage, in this paper, we first propose a proxy source node selection mechanism by constructing the candidate region. Secondly, based on the residual energy of the node, we propose a shortest routing algorithm to achieve better forwarding efficiency. Finally, by combining the proposed proxy source node selection mechanism with the proposed shortest routing algorithm based on the residual energy, we further propose a new, anonymous communication scheme. Meanwhile, the performance analysis indicates that the anonymous communication scheme can effectively protect the location privacy of the source nodes and reduce the network overhead.

DAENet: Making Strong Anonymity Scale in a Fully Decentralized Network

Traditional anonymous networks (e.g., Tor) are vulnerable to traffic analysis attacks that monitor the whole network traffic to determine which users are communicating. To preserve user anonymity against traffic analysis attacks, the emerging mix networks mess up the order of packets through a set of centralized and explicit shuffling nodes. However, this centralized design of mix networks is insecure against targeted DoS attacks that can completely block these shuffling nodes. In this article, we present <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">DAENet</i> , an efficient mix network that resists both targeted DoS attacks and traffic analysis attacks with a new abstraction called <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Stealthy Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Network</i> . The <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">stealthy P2P network</i> effectively hides the shuffling nodes used in a routing path into the whole network, such that adversaries cannot distinguish specific shuffling nodes and conduct targeted DoS attacks to block these nodes. In addition, to handle traffic analysis attacks, we leverage the confidentiality and integrity protection of Intel SGX to ensure trustworthy packet shuffles at each distributed host and use multiple routing paths to prevent adversaries from tracking and revealing user identities. We show that our system is scalable with moderate latency (2.2s) when running in a cluster of 10,000 participants and is robust in the case of machine failures, making it an attractive new design for decentralized anonymous communication. DAENet ’s code is released on <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://github.com/hku-systems/DAENet</uri> .

TOR Anonymous Traffic Fingerprint Extraction and Recognition Based on Neural Network

The TOR anonymous communication system is an important means to protect network communication security and user privacy, but there are still criminals trying to destroy the confidentiality of the anonymous communication system through some special methods. Aiming at the abuse of the TOR anonymous communication system, this paper proposes a neural network-based anonymous traffic identification method, which uses a one-dimensional convolutional neural network for feature extraction, prediction and classification, and finally integration. In the experiment, nearly 100 websites were selected for the flow feature extraction and recognition based on one-dimensional convolutional neural network. The recognition accuracy rate is 87.5%, indicating that this method can effectively fingerprint TOR anonymous communication.

TorMass: Tor for the Masses Domestic and Monetized Anonymous Communication

Abstract The increasing demand on privacy is driving a notable quest for privacy legal instruments and practical techniques. The Onion Router (Tor) is considered the most practical service for anonymous public communications; however, it is not yet mainstream despite more than one decade of practical use and research. The reason is referred to using message encryption layers, i.e., onions, via relays offered through unknown volunteers which does not fully protect legitimate users nor services. It can also be used for illegal purposes which hampers its admissibility in many countries. In this paper, we introduce a new ecosystem built on top of Tor to broaden its use by legitimate users and at the same time provide provenance when users violate the usage policy terms. We propose Anonymity Service Providers that provide paid relays as a service to users. A user buys this service from different providers to diversify the onion circuit and avoid collude and thus disclosing her identity. Anonymity is maintained as long as the user abides to the policy; otherwise, her identity is disclosed via a reporting system. This accountability reporting system can be implemented over a Smart Contract to make arbitration automatic. This work proposes new use cases and business opportunities that are worth consideration by both the research and business communities.

Шейминг в онлайн-комментарии как следствие анонимности интернеткоммуникации

Шейминг в онлайн-комментарии как следствие анонимности интернеткоммуникации

SACT: A New Model of Covert Communication Based on SDN.

Anonymous tracking technology of network watermarking is limited by the deployment of tracking devices in traditional network structure, resulting in poor scalability and reusability. Software Defined Network (SDN) boasts more freedom thanks to its separation of the control plane from the data plane. In this paper, a new anonymous communication tracking model SDN-based Anonymous Communication Tracking (SACT) is proposed, which introduces network watermarking into SDN and combines IP time hidden channel and symbol expansion technology. In addition, we introduce a hopping protection mechanism to improve the anti detection ability of the watermark as well. The experimental results show that in a variety of simulated network environments, SACT achieves excellent detection rate and bit error rate, thus it is sufficient to determine the communication relationship between the two parties. Meanwhile, SACT solves the deployment problem of anonymous tracking and improves the availability and scalability of covert communication.