EAGER: Towards Next Generation Anonymous Communication Networks

Cleveland State University, Cleveland OH

Investigators

Abstract

Anonymous communication has received increasing attention in the past decade because of concerns on privacy issues of communication through the Internet. Although these existing anonymous communication networks can greatly help protect communication privacy, these networks, especially the low-latency anonymous communication networks, are vulnerable to a number of traffic analysis attacks. The main objective of this project is to study new architectures for anonymous communications in order to defeat traffic analysis attacks, both passive and active traffic analysis attacks. The project focuses on hiding traffic patterns by dissipating statistical structure information of network traffic through network coding, which has never been tried before. Compared to the existing approaches, the new approaches will be able to hide traffic patterns while achieving higher bandwidth efficiency and suffering less degradation in the quality of service. A scientific foundation for anonymity networks is to be established through an understanding and analysis of the complex relationship among the levels of anonymity, usability of the networks, and amount of network resources needed. The project, if successful, will help stimulate new researches on anonymization approaches. Given increasingly pervasive nature of computing and communication setting and increasing popularity of anonymity networks, protecting communication privacy and privacy of various Internet applications is of great societal importance. The project also serves as a means to introduce minority students to academic research activity and to bring additional undergraduate and graduate to research in the network security and privacy area.