Probabilistic Analysis of Onion Routing in a Black-box Model

Abstract

We perform a probabilistic analysis of onion routing. The analysis is presented in a black-box model of anonymous communication that abstracts the essential properties of onion routing in the presence of an active adversary that controls a portion of the network and knows all a priori distributions on user choices of destination. Our results quantify how much the adversary can gain in identifying users by exploiting knowledge of their probabilistic behavior. In particular, we show that a user u's anonymity is worst either when the other users always choose the destination u is least likely to visit or when the other users always choose the destination u chooses. This worst-case anonymity with an adversary that controls a fraction b of the routers is comparable to the best-case anonymity against an adversary that controls a fraction square root of b.

Open PDF

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2007
Accession Number
ADA474872

Entities

People

  • Aaron M. Johnson
  • Joan Feigenbaum
  • Paul Syverson

Organizations

  • Yale University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • C4I
  • Energy and Power Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Anonymous Communications
  • Communication Systems
  • Computer Networks
  • Contractors
  • Electronic Mail
  • Equations
  • Governments
  • Internet Routing
  • Network Protocols
  • Network Science
  • Networks
  • Probability
  • Probability Distributions
  • Random Variables
  • Routing
  • Security

Fields of Study

  • Computer science
  • Mathematics

Readers

  • Adaptive Control and Estimation with Uncertainty in Dynamic Systems.
  • Computational Modeling and Simulation
  • Computer Networking