A Survey on Anonymous Communication Systems With a Focus on Dining Cryptographers Networks (IEEE Access)

[TheWanderer1983]

Abstract:
Traffic analysis attacks can counteract end-to-end encryption and use leaked communication metadata to reveal information about communicating parties. With an ever-increasing amount of traffic by an ever-increasing number of networked devices, communication privacy is undermined. Therefore, Anonymous Communication Systems (ACSs) are proposed to hide the relationship between transmitted messages and their senders and receivers, providing privacy properties known as anonymity, unlinkability, and unobservability. This article aims to review research in the ACSs field, focusing on Dining Cryptographers Networks (DCNs). The DCN-based methods are information-theoretically secure and thus provide unconditional unobservability guarantees. Their adoption for anonymous communications was initially hindered because their computational and communication overhead was deemed significant at that time, and scalability problems occurred. However, more recent contributions, such as the possibility to transmit messages of arbitrary length, efficient disruption handling and overhead improvements, have made the integration of modern DCN-based methods more realistic. In addition, the literature does not follow a common definition for privacy properties, making it hard to compare the approaches’ gains. Therefore, this survey contributes to introducing a harmonized terminology for ACS privacy properties, then presents an overview of the underlying principles of ACSs, in particular, DCN-based methods, and finally, investigates their alignment with the new harmonized privacy terminologies. Previous surveys did not cover the most recent research advances in the ACS area or focus on DCN-based methods. Our comprehensive investigation closes this gap by providing visual maps to highlight privacy properties and discussing the most promising ideas for making DCNs applicable in resource-constrained environments.

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[wkrp]

@TheWanderer1983 can you say something about this survey's relevance to censorship and circumvention, or highlight some sections that we should be paying attention to? The focus of this paper is anonymous communication, not censorship resistance. I can see how, for example, mixnets can give some ideas for dealing with traffic analysis attacks in censorship circumvention systems, but an anonymous communication system is not automatically censorship-resistant.

Even the "unobservability" property (Section II-C) is not what we usually think about as blocking resistance. A dining cryptographer network offers unconditional unobservability (Section IV-B), but that doesn't mean it would be difficult to block on the network.

[TheWanderer1983]

can you say something about this survey's relevance to censorship and circumvention, or highlight some sections that we should be paying attention to? The focus of this paper is anonymous communication, not censorship resistanc

I'm happy to remove, I agree the focus is anonymous communication, and not censorship resistance specifically, but what are censorship resistance technologies without novel applications and developments of these elements? and how long will a censorship resistance technology work in the cat and mouse game here without exploring other developments?
This paper highlight some interesting properties of DC-nets and recent developments, some which could be used with with other circumvention techniques to provide another solution.