On 12 August 2013 10:21, John Preston <[email protected]> wrote: > Consider a broadcast network: an eavesdropper cannot tell who a message > is intended for from just the transmission itself. By using asymmetric > encryption, the contents of the message can also be made unreadable to > the eavesdropper and all unintended recipients, still preserving perfect > single fact anonymity. > > Over time, an attacker could determine the intended recipient by looking > at who sent messages within a certain time frame from receiving a > message: the information gain from this is increased substantially if > certain information about the protocol of the messages is known (e.g. if > we're anonymising a real-time protocol, timed traffic analysis can > reveal an intended recipient with a high degree of certainty). This can > be defeated by including noise in the network: peers constantly produce > garbage packets. > > I believe that this would yield information theoretically secure > anonymity, as an attacker is looking for hay in a haystack, so to speak. > Obviously, the problem with this protocol is that it is horrendously > inefficient.
As Lance said, this is pretty close to what alt.anonymous.messages evolved into in the 90s and early 00's. I gave a talk two weeks ago looking at 10 years of messages there and finding user errors, weak passwords, user-segmenting settings, and traffic patterns. Details are over here: http://ritter.vg/blog-deanonymizing_amm.html -tom
