A Survey on Measuring Anonymity in Anonymous Communication Systems

Abstract

The popularity of Internet applications has made communication privacy an increasingly important security requirement. As an important aspect of privacy, anonymity ensures that a subject may use resources or services without disclosing user identity or corresponding relationships. Since the seminal work by Chaum for anonymous communication, many different anonymous communication systems, and anonymous protocols have been developed and investigated extensively. In recent years, anonymous communication systems have evolved from academic tools used by specialists to mass-market software used by millions of ordinary people. How to evaluate and quantify the anonymity that different anonymous communication systems can offer has been a new focus. Though some efforts have been made on anonymity metrics and measuring techniques, systematic research on measuring anonymity of anonymous communication systems is still needed. In this paper, we give a comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art research on measuring anonymity. We first summarize the anonymous mechanisms applied by different anonymous systems. We then introduce the formalization of the notion of anonymity for measuring the anonymity degree. Further, metrics based on various theories and approaches are reviewed. We particularly elaborate on the metrics based on information theory as a separate section because of its popularity and multiple branches. The metrics based on information entropy is probably of the greatest interest.

A Survey on Anonymous Communication Systems With a Focus on Dining Cryptographers Networks

“…Crowds [30], Hordes [52], LASTor [53], Torsk [54], Highspeed Onion Routing at the Network Layer (HORNET) [55], and Non-interactive Anonymous Router (NIAR) [56] are based on onion routing as well. Crowds was specially designed to hide a specific user's action within the actions of many others during web browsing [30], [57], [58]. Instead of operating a set of onion routers, Crowds' clients relay the traffic of others.…”

An Identity Privacy Protection Scheme in LTE-WLAN Heterogeneous Converged Network

“…Then, When receiving the EAP request/identity message for the first time in the authentication phase, WLAN-UE inputs and and computes 0 , and IMSI according to formula (21)(22)(23)(24), generates identity index , temporary identity HMSI and shared secret key recorded as 1 , HMSI 1 and 1 according to formula (25)(26)(27) for the next round of authentication.…”

“…In previous researches, many researchers devoted on evaluating and quantifying the anonymity of anonymous communication protocols and systems [24]. The efforts on the formalization of anonymity can be divided into methods based on process calculi [25], epistemic logic [26], UC framework [27], differential privacy [28], probabilistic automata [29,30] and I/O automata [31].…”

BCMIX: A Dynamic Self-organizing Blockchain-based Mix Anonymous System

“…According to the existing literature [5], [32], [33], BCMIX needs to satisfy the following fundamental security requirements.…”

“…Aiming to preserve communication privacy within the shared public network environment, anonymous communication mainly focus on how to hide the identities or address information of one side or both sides in communications. Since the seminal work by Chaum [4] for anonymous communication, more than seventy anonymous systems have been proposed, based on different anonymous mechanism [5]. Generally, anonymous systems can be divided into the following sub-types, mix re-encryption, multicast/broadcast, mix multi-layer encryption and peer-to-peer.…”