[messaging] Ronion anonymous routing protocol framework

[carlo von lynX]

James, capabilities: just what I had in mind!

James, SOCKS5: Sorry, my bad, I just assumed it is a
circuit-oriented interface. So Tor could introduce 
message types to support other parts of the SOCKS5 
protocol?

On Thu, Oct 19, 2017 at 02:46:23PM +0200, Jeff Burdges wrote:
> We've no reason to expect this to be possible right now, not literally

Wherever people wish to use VPN...?

> anyways.  Anything called cover traffic should contributes to the formal
> analysis of the anonymity properties, but useful traffic obeys
> non-uniform distributions. 

Sounds theoretical to me.

> I do think one could tune regular non-anonymous traffic to contribute as
> much as possible to obfuscating anonymous traffic.  We do not know what
> that means right now either, but presumably the words "differential
> privacy" appear.  

That makes no sense to me. If the attacker can
distinguish the anonymous from the non-anonymous
traffic, the latter isn't helpful to keep the
anonymous anonymous.

> I think this sounds plausible for peer-to-peer network maintenance
> traffic, but only with massive layering violations in the protocol
> stack, which sound controversial and far off right now.  I'm not too
> hopeful about file sharing traffic contributing much real analyzable
> anonymity, but..  

Wait, there was a paper presentation....
Claudia Diaz - Website fingerprinting on Tor: attacks and defences.
In the defense section she had some on-topic data.

> Can VoIP, streaming, and file sharing traffic be made indistinguishable

The moment you have VoIP and streaming intertwined, the strategies
used for phoneme, phrase or language detection are all going to
collapse... but you only get that if they're not running over
separate TLS streams like customary today.

> assuming all nodes are "spherical cows" who engage in similar quantities
> of all rolls in all traffic types?  Can flows between mix network
> routers be hidden inside these flows?  

Sometimes I lose track of the meaning of your words...

> There are even political moves that help like defending carrier grade
> NATs : 
> https://www.europol.europa.eu/newsroom/news/are-you-sharing-same-ip-address-criminal-law-enforcement-call-for-end-of-carrier-grade-nat-cgn-to-increase-accountability-online
> Or inventing new NAT behaviors that simultaneously benefit ISPs while
> making logging harder. 

I think law enforcement capabilities need to become a
design element of communication systems, rather than
an excuse to cultivate backdoors. Protocols define
when and how they accept a judge's order to collaborate
with police, and actual end-to-end intimacy becomes the
norm. But that's the nutshell of my talk on the subject,
so I better not try to condense it into a few lines.


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