The DISSENT Approach to Anonymous, Interactive Communication on the Internet

Joan Feigenbaum
Grace Murray Hopper Professor of Computer Science
Yale University
New Haven, CT 06520-8285

Abstract

Current anonymous-communication protocols based on onion routing (OR) suffer three basic flaws: (1) OR's security properties are largely only informally understood and not readily quantifiable; (2) OR inherently trades security for latency due to serialized relaying; and (3) anonymous disruptors can not only deny service but also defeat anonymity through adaptive denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. Existing dining-cryptographers (DC) approaches offer strong resistance to traffic analysis but are difficult to scale and just as vulnerable to disruption as OR. In this talk, we present ongoing work on DISSENT, the first practical anonymous-messaging protocol offering provable anonymity, strong protection against traffic analysis, and provable resistance to anonymous disruption.

Although the first version of DISSENT is suited only to non-interactive anonymous communication within small groups, we believe it points toward a new approach to highly interactive, large-scale anonymous communication at large scales that offers security and efficiency properties fundamentally stronger than those of OR.

This is joint work with Bryan Ford, Henry Corrigan-Gibbs, Vitaly Shmatikov, and Shu-chun Weng.