EAGER: Towards Next Generation Anonymous Communication Networks

在过去的十年中，由于对互联网通信隐私问题的关注，匿名通信受到了越来越多的关注。虽然这些现有的匿名通信网络可以极大地保护通信隐私，但这些网络，特别是低延迟匿名通信网络，容易受到许多流量分析攻击。该项目的主要目标是研究匿名通信的新架构，以击败流量分析攻击，包括被动和主动流量分析攻击。该项目侧重于通过网络编码将网络流量的统计结构信息耗散，从而隐藏流量模式，这是以前从未尝试过的。与现有方法相比，新方法能够隐藏流量模式，同时实现更高的带宽效率和更小的服务质量下降。通过理解和分析匿名级别、网络可用性和所需网络资源之间的复杂关系，建立匿名网络的科学基础。这个项目如果成功，将有助于激发对匿名化方法的新研究。鉴于计算和通信环境的日益普及以及匿名网络的日益普及，保护通信隐私和各种互联网应用程序的隐私具有重要的社会意义。该项目还作为一种手段，将少数民族学生引入学术研究活动，并使更多的本科生和研究生参与网络安全和隐私领域的研究。

Anonymous communication has received increasing attention in the past decade because of concerns on privacy issues of communication through the Internet. Although these existing anonymous communication networks can greatly help protect communication privacy, these networks, especially the low-latency anonymous communication networks, are vulnerable to a number of traffic analysis attacks.The main objective of this project is to study new architectures for anonymous communications in order to defeat traffic analysis attacks, both passive and active traffic analysis attacks. The project focuses on hiding traffic patterns by dissipating statistical structure information of network traffic through network coding, which has never been tried before. Compared to the existing approaches, the new approaches will be able to hide traffic patterns while achieving higher bandwidth efficiency and suffering less degradation in the quality of service. A scientific foundation for anonymity networks is to be established through an understanding and analysis of the complex relationship among the levels of anonymity, usability of the networks, and amount of network resources needed. The project, if successful, will help stimulate new researches on anonymization approaches.Given increasingly pervasive nature of computing and communication setting and increasing popularity of anonymity networks, protecting communication privacy and privacy of various Internet applications is of great societal importance. The project also serves as a means to introduce minority students to academic research activity and to bring additional undergraduate and graduate to research in the network security and privacy area.