[messaging] Ronion anonymous routing protocol framework

[Jeff Burdges]

On Wed, 2017-10-18 at 16:39 +0200, carlo von lynX wrote:
> The trick is to make the cover traffic actually useful for
> end-users.. ideally by making *all* of their everyday
> operations a part of the cover traffic.

We've no reason to expect this to be possible right now, not literally
anyways.  Anything called cover traffic should contributes to the formal
analysis of the anonymity properties, but useful traffic obeys
non-uniform distributions. 

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.  

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..  

There are weaker defenses that do not defeat powerful adversaries, but
may stimy weaker ones :  

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

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. 

Jeff


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