A Survey on Routing in Anonymous Communication Protocols
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A Survey on Routing in Anonymous Communication Protocols Fatemeh Shirazi Milivoj Simeonovski Muhammad Rizwan Asghar KU Leuven CISPA, Saarland University Department of Computer Science ESAT/COSIC and iMinds Saarland Informatics Campus The University of Auckland Michael Backes Claudia Diaz CISPA, Saarland University & MPI-SWS KU Leuven Saarland Informatics Campus ESAT/COSIC and iMinds Abstract—The Internet has undergone dramatic changes of this transformation, the mass reach of the Internet has in the past 15 years, and now forms a global communication created new powerful threats to online privacy. platform that billions of users rely on for their daily ac- tivities. While this transformation has brought tremendous The widespread dissemination of personal informa- benefits to society, it has also created new threats to online tion that we witness today in social media platforms privacy, ranging from profiling of users for monetizing and applications is certainly a source of concern. The personal information to nearly omnipotent governmental disclosure of potentially sensitive data, however, not surveillance. As a result, public interest in systems for only happens when people deliberately post content anonymous communication has drastically increased. Several online, but also inadvertently by merely engaging in any such systems have been proposed in the literature, each sort of online activities. This inadvertent data disclosure of which offers anonymity guarantees in different scenarios and under different assumptions, reflecting the plurality of is particularly worrisome because non-expert end-users approaches for how messages can be anonymously routed cannot be expected to understand the dimensions of the to their destination. Understanding this space of competing collection taking place and its corresponding privacy approaches with their different guarantees and assumptions implications. is vital for users to understand the consequences of different design options. Widely deployed communication protocols only pro- tect, if at all, the content of conversations, but do not In this work, we survey previous research on designing, conceal from network observers who is communicating developing, and deploying systems for anonymous commu- with whom, when, from where, and for how long. Net- nication. To this end, we provide a taxonomy for clustering work eavesdroppers can silently monitor users’ online all prevalently considered approaches (including Mixnets, behavior and build up comprehensive profiles based DC-nets, onion routing, and DHT-based protocols) with on the aggregation of user communications’ metadata. respect to their unique routing characteristics, deployabil- ity, and performance. This, in particular, encompasses the Today, users are constantly tracked, monitored, and pro- topological structure of the underlying network; the routing filed, both with the intent of monetizing their personal information that has to be made available to the initiator information through targeted advertisements, and by arXiv:1608.05538v1 [cs.CR] 19 Aug 2016 of the conversation; the underlying communication model; nearly omnipotent governmental agencies that rely on and performance-related indicators such as latency and com- the mass collection of metadata for conducting dragnet munication layer. Our taxonomy and comparative assessment surveillance at a planetary scale. provide important insights about the differences between the existing classes of anonymous communication protocols, and Anonymous Communication (AC) systems have been it also helps to clarify the relationship between the routing proposed as a technical countermeasure to mitigate the characteristics of these protocols, and their performance and threats of communications surveillance. The concept of scalability. AC systems was introduced by Chaum [1] in 1981, Keywords—Anonymous Communication; Routing; Privacy. with his proposal for implementing an anonymous email service that aimed at concealing who sent emails to whom. The further development of this concept in the last decades has seen it applied to a variety of problems I. Introduction and scenarios, such as anonymous voting [2], [3], Private Information Retrieval (PIR) [4], censorship-resistance [5], The Internet has evolved from a mere communication [6], anonymous web browsing [7], hidden web ser- network used by millions of users to a global platform vices [8], and many others. for social networking, communication, education, enter- tainment, trade, and political activism used by billions Public interest in AC systems has strikingly increased of users. In addition to the indisputable societal benefits in the last few years. This could be explained as a response to recently revealed dragnet surveillance pro- A. Routing Characteristics grams, the fact that deployed AC networks seem to become (according to leaked documents1) a major hurdle Generally, routing in a communication network refers for communications surveillance, and to somewhat in- to the selection of nodes for relaying communication creased public awareness on the threats to privacy posed through the network. Routing schemes, however, re- by modern information and communication technolo- quire some essential design components. For anonymous gies. communication, we consider four building blocks that are relevant to routing in AC networks. These building The literature offers a broad variety of proposals for blocks are node management, transfer/retrieval of node anonymity network designs. Several of these designs information to/by the routing decision maker, path selec- have been implemented, and some are successfully de- tion, and forwarding or relaying; where path selection is ployed in the wild. Of the deployed systems, the most the main design component of routing schemes for AC successful example to date is the Tor network, which is protocols. used daily by about two million people [9]. Several taxonomies and classifications for routing Existing designs take a variety of approaches to protocols have been proposed in the literature [19]–[21]. anonymous routing for implementing the AC network. However, AC networks aim to conceal the metadata of Routing determines how data is sent through the net- communications and thus have security requirements work, and it as such constitutes the central element of the that make them fundamentally different from other net- AC design, determining to a large extent both security works. and performance of the system. These approaches rely In this section, we present a classification for anony- on different threat models and sets of assumptions, and mous routing protocols. Our classification (see Tables II they provide different guarantees to their users. Even and III) is an adaptation from Feeney’s taxonomy [20], though survey articles on AC systems exist [10]–[18], we which classifies the routing characteristics of mobile ad still lack a systematic understanding, classification, and hoc networks into four categories: comparison of the routing characteristics of the plurality of existing AC approaches. 1) Communication model describes whether the com- The purpose of this survey is to provide a detailed munication is based on single-channels or multi- overview of the routing characteristics of current AC channels. systems, and to examine how their features determine 2) Structure describes whether or not nodes are treated the anonymity guarantees offered by those systems, as equally. well as its overall performance. To this end, we first 3) State information describes where the topology infor- identify the routing characteristics that are relevant for mation is maintained. AC protocols and provide a taxonomy for clustering 4) Scheduling describes whether the information about the systems with respect to their routing characteristics, routes is maintained at the source or is instead deployability, and performance. Then, we apply the tax- computed on-demand. onomy to the extensive scope of existing AC systems, This taxonomy does not address several relevant in particular including Mixnets, DC-nets, onion routing design features of AC networks, such as probabilistic systems, and DHT-based protocols. Finally, we discuss node selection for constructing circuits, and security the relationship between the different routing decisions, considerations for protecting routing information from and how they affect performance and scalability. different network adversaries. In addition, not all the characteristics identified by Feeney are relevant to AC Outline. Section II provides our taxonomy for anony- routing. For example, the distinction between single- mous routing and describes the various routing features and multi-channel features is not relevant in overlay and dimensions that we are considering for our eval- networks, which constitutes a standard design choice for uation. Section III gives a compact tabular overview many AC networks. describing the classification of existing systems in our taxonomy and reviews existing AC systems with respect We redefine Feeney’s criteria to account for design to their routing characteristics, substantiating the com- choices that are relevant to anonymous routing protocols. pact overview provided in the previous section. Section We distinguish three groups of features inspired by IV discusses the relationship between routing decisions Feeney’s categories: network structure, routing information, and security and anonymity goals, and shares some and communication model: lessons learned. Section V concludes the paper. 1)