Anonymity¹ networks protect people living under repressive regimes from surveillance of their Internet use. But the recent discovery of vulnerabilities in the most popular of these networks -- Tor -- has prompted computer scientists to try to come up with more secure anonymity schemes. At the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium² in July, researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne will present a new anonymity scheme that provides strong security guarantees but uses bandwidth much more efficiently³ than its predecessors⁴. In experiments, the researchers' system required only one-tenth as much time as existing systems to transfer a large file between anonymous⁵ users.

 

"The initial use case that we thought of was to do anonymous file-sharing, where the receiving end and sending end don't know each other," says Albert Kwon, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science and first author on the new paper. "The reason is that things like honeypotting" -- in which spies offer services through an anonymity network in order to entrap⁶ its users -- "are a real issue. But we also studied applications in microblogging, something like Twitter, where you want to anonymously⁷ broadcast your messages to everyone."

 

The system devised by Kwon and his coauthors -- his advisor⁸, Srini Devadas, the Edwin Sibley Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT; David Lazar, also a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science; and Bryan Ford⁹ SM '02 PhD '08, an associate professor of computer and communication sciences at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne -- employs several existing cryptographic techniques but combines them in a novel manner.

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