SoK on Performance Bounds in Anonymous Communication

Research output: Contribution to book/conference proceedings/anthology/reportConference contributionContributedpeer-review

Contributors

  • Christiane Kuhn - , Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Author)
  • Friederike Kitzing - , TUD Dresden University of Technology (Author)
  • Thorsten Strufe - , Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Author)

Abstract

Communicating anonymously comes at a cost-and large communities have been in a constant tug-of-war between the development of faster protocols, and the improvement of security analyses. Thereby more intricate privacy goals emerged and more detailed bounds on the minimum overhead necessary to achieve them were proven. The entanglement of requirements, scenarios, and protocols complicates analysis, and the published results are hardly comparable, due to deviating, yet specific choices of assumptions and goals (some explicit, most implicit). In this paper, we systematize the field by harmonizing the models, comparing the proven performance bounds, and contextualizing these theoretical results in a broad set of proposed and implemented systems. By identifying inaccuracies, we demonstrate that the attacks, on which the results are based, indeed break much weaker privacy goals than postulated, and tighten the bounds along the way. We further show the equivalence of two seemingly alternative bounds. Finally, we argue how several assumptions and requirements of the papers likely are of limited applicability in reality and suggest relaxations for future work.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationWPES 2020 - Proceedings of the 19th Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages21-39
Number of pages19
ISBN (electronic)978-1-4503-8086-7
Publication statusPublished - 9 Nov 2020
Peer-reviewedYes

Conference

Title19th ACM Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society, WPES 2020, held in conjunction with the 27th ACM Conference on Computer and Communication Security, CCS 2020
Duration9 November 2020
CityVirtual, Online
CountryUnited States of America

External IDs

Scopus 85097252477

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Keywords

  • anonymity, limits, performance, privacy