The design and implementation of the A3 application-aware anonymity platform

Sherr, Micah; Gill, Harjot; Saeed, Taher; Mao, Andrew; Marczak, William R.; Soundararajan, Saravana; Zhou, Wenchao; Loo, Boon Thau; Blaze, Matt

doi:10.1016/j.comnet.2013.09.021

Cited by 3 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 52 publications

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“…A path selection method in which overloaded nodes are avoided is proposed [9]. Sherr et al [10] introduce a flexible path selection design in which applications select a trade-off between performance and anonymity based on the user's specific requirements. Furthermore the notion of trust is employed in [11], [12], [13], [14] in order to increase security.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

A composite-metric based path selection technique for the Tor anonymity network

Milajerdi

Kharrazi

2015

Journal of Systems and Software

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Abstract-The Tor anonymous network has become quite popular with regular users on the Internet. In the Tor network, an anonymous path is created by selecting three relays through which the connection is redirected. Nevertheless, as the number of Tor users has increased substantially in recent years, the algorithm with which the relays are selected affects the performance provided by the Tor network. More importantly as the performance suffers, users will leave the network, resulting in a lower anonymity set and in turn lower security provided by Tor network.In this paper, we proposed an algorithm for improving performance and security of the Tor network, by employing a combination of different metrics in the process of the path selection between the source and destination node. These metrics are bandwidth and uptime of relays as node conditions and delays between the relays as a path condition. Through a number of experiments we show that we could double the performance observed by end users when using the proposed technique as opposed to the current Tor path selection algorithm. More importantly, the proposed technique only requires a software upgrade on the client side, and other Tor nodes do not need to be modified.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

A composite-metric based path selection technique for the Tor anonymity network

Milajerdi

Kharrazi

2015

Journal of Systems and Software

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“…The Declarative Secure Distributed Systems (DS2) platform provides high-level programming abstractions for implementing secure distributed systems, achieved by unifying declarative networking and logic-based access control specifications [12]. DS2 has a wide range of applications, including reconfigurable trust management [35], secure distributed data processing [34], and tunable anonymity [51].…”

Section: Securing Distributed Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To further illustrate the feasibility of our methods and technologies for the development of secure distributed systems, we have conceptualized and implemented the Application-Aware Anonymity (A 3 ) system [7,51], a distributed peer-topeer service that provides high-performance anonymity "for the masses". A 3 uses SeNDlog for implementing an extensible policy engine for customizing its relay selection and instantiation strategies.…”

Section: Application-aware Anonymitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As evidence of its widespread applicability, declarative techniques have been used in several domains including fault tolerance protocols [52], cloud computing [4], sensor networks [11], overlay network compositions [33], anonymity systems [51], mobile ad-hoc networks [37,24], wireless channel selection [23], network configuration management [10], and as a basis for course projects in a distributed systems class [14] at the University of Pennsylvania. An open-source declarative networking system called RapidNet [3] has also been integrated with the emerging ns-3 [40] simulator, demonstrated at SIGCOMM'09 [38], and successfully deployed on testbeds such as PlanetLab [44] and ORBIT [42].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Recent Advances in Declarative Networking

Loo

Zhou

2012

Synthesis Lectures on Data Management

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Declarative networking is a programming methodology that enables developers to concisely specify network protocols and services, and directly compile these specifications into a dataflow framework for execution. This paper describes recent advances in declarative networking, tracing its evolution from a rapid prototyping framework towards a platform that serves as an important bridge connecting formal theories for reasoning about protocol correctness and actual implementations. In particular, the paper focuses on the use of declarative networking for addressing four main challenges in the distributed systems development cycle: the generation of safe routing implementations, debugging, security and privacy, and optimizing distributed systems.

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“…However, different users have different needs for communication anonymity through the Internet. Current anonymous communication cannot meet the variety of anonymous needs of different users [6]. User on-demand anonymous communication is that users can dynamically adjust the anonymity level of their communication according to the sensitivity of their transmitted information, which meets the user's various anonymity needs.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Survey of Privacy Protection and Network Security in User On-Demand Anonymous Communication

et al. 2020

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In an untrusted Internet environment, there is a large amount of user privacy information being vulnerable to various attacks, and it is an important security concern for users on how to protect their privacy, and to further provide the anonymity guarantee. Recently, most privacy-sensitive users prefer anonymous communication to protect their private information from eavesdropping by attackers. Each user has different privacy protection demands for anonymous communication. However, anonymous communication methods cannot meet the various anonymity needs of users. Hence, the user on-demand anonymous communication is proposed, which can dynamically adjust the anonymity level according to a user's anonymity needs. However, the defense capabilities against attacks are insufficient in the existing user on-demand anonymous communication. Some malicious users in the network employ anonymous communication to hide their identities and attack the Internet. Moreover, the existing user on-demand anonymous communication is weak against traffic classification attacks based on machine learning. Therefore, this paper investigates its progresses and defects in privacy protection and network security. User on-demand anonymous communication is mainly composed of the user side and the transmission side. We separately investigate privacy protection and network security of user on-demand anonymous communication from the user side and the transmission side. By surveying various identity anonymity of users on the user side and the hierarchical anonymous transmission on the transmission side, we find two kinds of serious attacks in user on-demand anonymous communication, i.e., abuse of anonymous communication and traffic classification attacks based on machine learning. To solve the above security issues, we suggest the balancing mechanism of anonymous communication and behavior tracking which is used to prevent anonymous abuse, and the secure defense mechanism which is used to resist traffic classification attacks. To inspire follow-up research, we identify some open problems and emphasize future trends concerning user on-demand anonymous communication. INDEX TERMS Privacy protection, network security, machine learning, traffic classification attacks, user on-demand anonymous communication.

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The design and implementation of the A3 application-aware anonymity platform

Cited by 3 publications

References 52 publications

A composite-metric based path selection technique for the Tor anonymity network

A composite-metric based path selection technique for the Tor anonymity network

Recent Advances in Declarative Networking

A Survey of Privacy Protection and Network Security in User On-Demand Anonymous Communication

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