ALADDIN
CENTER Carnegie Mellon UniversityCarnegie Mellon Computer Science DepartmentSchool of Computer Science
REU
Mini-PROBE: Anonymous Communication
Aladdin
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Andrew
Bortz

Luis
von Ahn

Manuel
Blum

We are addressing the "sender anonymity" problem, which stated informally is the following: how does an individual send a message anonymously and reliably to an adversary that controls the communications network as well as some of the communicating parties? More formally: how do two nodes conduct communications such that no adversary -- either as a participant or outside observer -- can prove to an arbitrator (that trusts that adversary's ability to gather data) that a specific node, not in collusion with the adversary, was the sender of a specific message? In essence, it is the ability to distinguish the sender from the other, "innocent" participants in the protocol.

There is currently a good deal of research into this problem, with some interesting and somewhat useful results. [1], [2] However, both the research dealing with providing the highest degree of anonymity and the research dealing with efficient protocols that provide some anonymity are flawed in that either they are good (provide sufficiently high degrees of anonymity), are efficient, or are practical, but never all of the above. Sometimes they are none. We believe the problem has immediate relevance in today's world of increasing censorship, especially on the Internet and in technology in general. We are investigating solutions and in the hopes of advancing the current state of knowledge.

[1] David Chaum, The Dining Cryptographers Problem: Unconditional Sender and Recipient Untraceability, Journal of Cryptology 1(1): 65-75 (1988).
[2] David Chaum, Untraceable electronic mail, return addresses, and digital pseudonyms, Communications of the ACM, 24(2): 84-88, 1981.

Preliminary Presentation (ppt), (pdf)

Other Mini-PROBEs for Summer 2003

Algorithms for Facility Location
Designing Overlay Multicast Networks for Streaming
Dynamic Algorithms
HumanAUT
Moving Mesh Simulations
Space-Efficient Point Location

 

This material is based upon work supported by National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0122581.
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the
National Science Foundation