Anonymus Communication
Anonymus communication —
Researchers Christiane Kuhn and Christoph Coijanovic (PhD Students)
Motivation
- Privacy is integral for societal progress
- Especially important: privacy in online communications (freedom of speech, profiling, etc.)
- Even if encryption ensures confidentiality, <i>metadata</i> reveals valuable information:
- Who communicates with whom?
- How often are people communicating?
- Privacy protection goals are usually informal and prone to misunderstanding
Use-case
- Formalization of privacy goals enables a clearer understanding of which information is (not) hidden
- Analysis and improvement of existing privacy-focused communication protocols (e.g., Signal, Tor)
- Adapting existing anonymous communication protocols to support group communication
Methods
- Formalize privacy goals through indistinguishability games
- Investigate the relation between different goals
- Use formalized goals to prove privacy protection of existing and future protocols
Future
- Use generated knowledge to improve ACNs
- Scalable group communication with strong privacy protection
- Extension of provable privacy to different protocol classes
- Proximity-tracing
- Payment systems
- Group membership management
Publications on this topic
2PPS – Publish/Subscribe with Provable Privacy
Abdelwahab Gaballah, S.; Coijanovic, C.; Strufe, T.; Mühlhäuser, M.
2021. 40th International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS), Chicago, IL, USA, 20-23 Sept. 2021. Vol.: 1, 198–209, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). doi:10.1109/SRDS53918.2021.00028
Abdelwahab Gaballah, S.; Coijanovic, C.; Strufe, T.; Mühlhäuser, M.
2021. 40th International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS), Chicago, IL, USA, 20-23 Sept. 2021. Vol.: 1, 198–209, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). doi:10.1109/SRDS53918.2021.00028
Plausible Deniability for Anonymous Communication
Kuhn, C.; Noppel, M.; Wressnegger, C.; Strufe, T.
2021. Proceedings of 20th Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES), Seoul, South Korea, November 15, 2021, 17–32, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). doi:10.1145/3463676.3485605
Kuhn, C.; Noppel, M.; Wressnegger, C.; Strufe, T.
2021. Proceedings of 20th Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES), Seoul, South Korea, November 15, 2021, 17–32, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). doi:10.1145/3463676.3485605
SoK on Performance Bounds in Anonymous Communication
Kuhn, C.; Kitzing, F.; Strufe, T.
2020. Proceedings of the 19th Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society, 21–39, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). doi:10.1145/3411497.3420218
Kuhn, C.; Kitzing, F.; Strufe, T.
2020. Proceedings of the 19th Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society, 21–39, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). doi:10.1145/3411497.3420218
Physical Layer Privacy in Broadcast Channels
Lin, P.-H.; Kuhn, C.; Strufe, T.; Jorswieck, E. A.
2019. 2019 IEEE International Workshop on Information Forensics and Security (WIFS), 1–6, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). doi:10.1109/WIFS47025.2019.9035093
Lin, P.-H.; Kuhn, C.; Strufe, T.; Jorswieck, E. A.
2019. 2019 IEEE International Workshop on Information Forensics and Security (WIFS), 1–6, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). doi:10.1109/WIFS47025.2019.9035093