[messaging] Vuvuzela: Scalable Private Messaging Resistant to Traffic Analysis

[Jeff Burdges]

On Mon, 2015-06-22 at 00:34 -0700, Trevor Perrin wrote:
> The authors argue permanent mailboxes work OK here since dialing
> messages are smaller and less frequent than conversation messages.
> But in their example, users send a 512 byte conversation message every
> minute, and download an average of 2 MB (!) of dialing messages. 

If I read correctly, there are dialing rounds only every 20 min or
whatever, so dialing might only be 100k overhead amortized to the
conversation rounds.  That's still huge though. 

> I'm not sure what the alternatives are.  Maybe if the shared secret
> could be established some other way (like Pond's PANDA, or DH between
> long-term keys), then it could be used to derive time slots where the
> correspondents try to communicate?

Yes, time slots are an interesting idea.  First, users pay the scaling
cost dialing in latency as they add more contacts.  And they switch
servers if they want less latency and less anonymity.  Second, time
slots is likely orthogonal to most other information theoretically
secure techniques, like Python's gate, etc.

Jeff


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 819 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://moderncrypto.org/mail-archive/messaging/attachments/20150622/ca7e8424/attachment.sig>