Hi all, I am a master student in Artificial Intelligence, doing a thesis on privacy technologies, more precisely on traffic analysis resistance in the context of instant messaging.
We am interested in developing a plug-in for IM clients to conceal the users communication profiles (how often users communicate and with whom) from the service provider. To achieve this, our strategy would be to have the IM client generate dummy messages and mix them with the real traffic, thus introducing noise in the communication profile observed by the service provider. Messages would be encrypted, as a first step to prevent the service from filtering out the dummy traffic. In a second step, real messages might also be made less distinguishable from dummy messages by slightly delaying them, in an attempt to conceal their timing patterns. Moreover, dummy messages could be sent to friends only or to both friends and random users. The former would conceal the actual "weights" in the communication profile while revealing the list of contacts; the latter would potentially allow to conceal the whole profile itself, both its weights and the list of friends. I am aware that this approach is not perfect and generates an excess in bandwidth, but the extra privacy and the compatibility with existing IM platforms might justify it. I was wondering: Would anybody be interested in using such system ? Do you know of a tool doing something similar already ? Do you have any comments or ideas? Any comments/feedback would be greatly appreciated. Best regards, Hugo Herter
_______________________________________________ OTR-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.cypherpunks.ca/mailman/listinfo/otr-dev
