Onion routing with replies

Research output: Contribution to book/conference proceedings/anthology/reportChapter in book/anthology/reportContributed

Contributors

Abstract

Onion routing (OR) protocols are a crucial tool for providing anonymous internet communication. An OR protocol enables a user to anonymously send requests to a server. A fundamental problem of OR protocols is how to deal with replies: ideally, we would want the server to be able to send a reply back to the anonymous user without knowing or disclosing the user’s identity. Existing OR protocols do allow for such replies, but do not provably protect the payload (i.e., message) of replies against manipulation. Kuhn et al. (IEEE S&P 2020) show that such manipulations can in fact be leveraged to break anonymity of the whole protocol. In this work, we close this gap and provide the first framework and protocols for OR with protected replies. We define security in the sense of an ideal functionality in the universal composability model, and provide corresponding (less complex) game-based security notions for the individual properties. We also provide two secure instantiations of our framework: one based on updatable encryption, and one based on succinct non-interactive arguments (SNARGs) to authenticate payloads both in requests and replies. In both cases, our central technical handle is an implicit authentication of the transmitted payload data, as opposed to an explicit, but insufficient authentication (with MACs) in previous solutions. Our results exhibit a new and surprising application of updatable encryption outside of long-term data storage.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationAdvances in Cryptology – ASIACRYPT 2021
PublisherSpringer, Berlin [u. a.]
Pages573–604
Number of pages32
Publication statusPublished - 2021
Peer-reviewedNo

Publication series

SeriesLecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 13091
ISSN0302-9743

External IDs

Scopus 85121932581
dblp conf/asiacrypt/KuhnHRS21
Mendeley 3375c0a1-f3c7-3d48-9646-a6a4a1eb569e
unpaywall 10.1007/978-3-030-92075-3_20

Keywords

Library keywords