Unobservable Surfing on the World Wide Web: Is Private Information Retrieval an Alternative to the MIX Based Approach?

Kesdoğan, Doğan; Borning, Mark; Schmeink, Michael

doi:10.1007/3-540-36467-6_17

Cited by 9 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…RELATED WORK Pfitzmann and Hansen [45] proposed definitions for privacy-related concepts including unobservability. Unobservability has been interpreted as anonymity or plausible deniability in various systems [8,37], none of which hide the fact that a given user is participating in the system. We do not consider such systems in this paper because they are easily blockable and thus not censorship-resistant.…”

Section: Manipulating Upstream Packetsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Parrot Is Dead: Observing Unobservable Network Communications

Houmansadr

Brubaker

Shmatikov

2013

2013 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy

118

111

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In response to the growing popularity of Tor and other censorship circumvention systems, censors in nondemocratic countries have increased their technical capabilities and can now recognize and block network traffic generated by these systems on a nationwide scale. New censorship-resistant communication systems such as SkypeMorph, StegoTorus, and CensorSpoofer aim to evade censors' observations by imitating common protocols like Skype and HTTP.We demonstrate that these systems completely fail to achieve unobservability. Even a very weak, local censor can easily distinguish their traffic from the imitated protocols. We show dozens of passive and active methods that recognize even a single imitated session, without any need to correlate multiple network flows or perform sophisticated traffic analysis.We enumerate the requirements that a censorship-resistant system must satisfy to successfully mimic another protocol and conclude that "unobservability by imitation" is a fundamentally flawed approach. We then present our recommendations for the design of unobservable communication systems.

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Section: Manipulating Upstream Packetsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Parrot Is Dead: Observing Unobservable Network Communications

Houmansadr

Brubaker

Shmatikov

2013

2013 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy

118

111

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“…Our discussion above focused on the PIR, which itself is a fundamental privacy technology that can enable numerous applications, including PIR-Tor [46], PIR for e-commerce [31], PIR for MIX Nets [35]. Benefits of DP-ORAM extend to other applications as well.…”

Section: Other Applicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…for e-commerce [31], PIR for MIX Nets [35]. Benefits of DP-ORAM extend to other applications as well.…”

Section: Other Applicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Differentially Private Oblivious RAM

Wagh

Cuff

Mittal

2018

Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies

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In this work, we investigate if statistical privacy can enhance the performance of ORAM mechanisms while providing rigorous privacy guarantees. We propose a formal and rigorous framework for developing ORAM protocols with statistical security viz., a differentially private ORAM (DP-ORAM). We present Root ORAM, a family of DP-ORAMs that provide a tunable, multi-dimensional trade-off between the desired bandwidth overhead, local storage and system security. We theoretically analyze Root ORAM to quantify both its security and performance. We experimentally demonstrate the benefits of Root ORAM and find that (1) Root ORAM can reduce local storage overhead by about 2× for a reasonable values of privacy budget, significantly enhancing performance in memory limited platforms such as trusted execution environments, and (2) Root ORAM allows tunable trade-offs between bandwidth, storage, and privacy, reducing bandwidth overheads by up to 2×-10× (at the cost of increased storage/statistical privacy), enabling significant reductions in ORAM access latencies for cloud environments. We also analyze the privacy guarantees of DP-ORAMs through the lens of information theoretic metrics of Shannon entropy and Min-entropy [16]. Finally, Root ORAM is ideally suited for applications which have a similar access pattern, and we showcase its utility via the application of Private Information Retrieval.

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“…Moreover, as described in Kesdogan et al (2002), classical PIR protocols cannot yet be applied to the web, due not only to computation and communication costs, but also because PIR considers unstructured (“flat”) data, while in the web the data structure can be modelled as a graph (i.e. structured data).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In order to apply PIR to the web environment the hierarchy of the link structure has to be considered and handled when redundant queries are constructed. Kesdogan et al (2002) present a theoretical extension for PIR to the web that is not, however, generally applicable, as it requires redesign of the servers. In our current work we deal with a problem similar to web‐PIR.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cluster‐analysis attack against a PRivAte Web solution (PRAW)

Elovici

Shapira

Meshiach

2006

Online Information Review

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PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to prove the ability of PRivAte Web (PRAW) – a system for private web browsing – to stand possible attacks.Design/methodology/approachAttacks on the systems were simulated, manipulating systems variables. A privacy measure was defined to evaluate the capability of the systems to stand the attacks. Analysis of results was performed.FindingsIt was shown that, even if the attack is optimised to provide the attacker's highest utility, the similarity between the user profile and the approximated profile is pretty low and does not enable the eavesdropper to derive an accurate estimation of the user profile.Research limitations/implicationsOne limitation is the “cold start” problem – in the current version, an observer might detect the first transaction, which is always a real user transaction. As a remedy for this problem, the first transaction will be randomly delayed and a random number of fake transactions played before the real one (according to Tr). Another limitation is that PRAW supports only link browsing, originated in search engine interactions (since it is the most common interaction on the web. It should be extended to include concealment of browsing to links originating in the “Favourites” list, that users tend to browse regularly (even a few times a day) for professional or personal reasons.Practical implicationsPRAW is feasible and preserves the privacy of web browsers. It is now undergoing commercialisation to become a shelf tool for privacy preservation.Originality/valueThe paper presents a practical statistical method for privacy preservation and proved that it is standing possible attacks. Methods usually proposed for this problem are not statistical, but cryptography oriented, and are too expensive in processing‐time to be practical.

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Unobservable Surfing on the World Wide Web: Is Private Information Retrieval an Alternative to the MIX Based Approach?

Cited by 9 publications

References 22 publications

The Parrot Is Dead: Observing Unobservable Network Communications

The Parrot Is Dead: Observing Unobservable Network Communications

Differentially Private Oblivious RAM

Cluster‐analysis attack against a PRivAte Web solution (PRAW)

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