Collaborative Research: AF: Medium: Foundations of Anonymous Communication in Large-Scale Networks

合作研究：AF：媒介：大规模网络中匿名通信的基础

• 批准号: 2312242
• 负责人: Tal Malkin
• 金额: $ 30万
• 依托单位: Columbia University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2023-09-15 至 2027-08-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2312242&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; AF; Medium; Foundations

A major challenge in network communication is providing anonymity and privacy without significant increase in latency and message complexity. While it is known how to secure the contents of messages via proper encryption techniques, it is less clear how to ensure that who is communicating with whom remains private, too. Currently used anonymity technologies such as the Tor network (used by millions daily) are practical but do not provide provable anonymity guarantees; in fact, security researchers have demonstrated that Tor is vulnerable to a type of Internet attack called traffic analysis. How to guarantee anonymity without rendering current systems too impractical remains an open question of high relevance to many widely used applications. This project create and disseminates algorithms that implement rigorous and efficient solutions to anonymous communication. The project also includes educational initiatives at the graduate and undergraduate levels to build a bigger workforce in the crucial area of privacy, security and computer science more generally.This project addresses the fundamental challenge of guaranteeing anonymity in network communications. Techniques for obscuring meta-information about who is communicating with whom, when, and for how long inevitably involve increased communication (e.g., by rerouting communication through intermediate nodes and/or adding decoy messages). This in turn may lead to network congestion and communication delays. Thus, a crucial question of both theoretical and practical importance is to understand the trade-offs between security and message complexity in network communications under various privacy measures and adversarial models. A second challenge is to design provably secure and efficient anonymous communication schemes in realistic communications scenarios, such as node churn and iterative two-way communications. The team of researchers will address these challenges along two facets: (1) Designing routing schemes so that traffic patterns, possibly altered by malicious nodes, do not reveal any metadata; and (2) Designing cryptographically secure tools (such as cryptographic onions) to secure data even when the network participants responsible for relaying it are potentially adversarial.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

网络通信中的一个主要挑战是在不显著增加延迟和消息复杂性的情况下提供匿名和隐私。虽然人们知道如何通过适当的加密技术来保护消息的内容，但如何确保谁与谁通信也保持私密性还不太清楚。目前使用的匿名技术，如Tor网络（每天有数百万人使用）是实用的，但不能提供可证明的匿名保证;事实上，安全研究人员已经证明，Tor容易受到一种称为流量分析的互联网攻击。如何保证匿名性而不使当前的系统太不切实际仍然是一个悬而未决的问题，许多广泛使用的应用程序的高度相关性。该项目创建和传播算法，实现严格和有效的解决方案，以匿名通信。该项目还包括在研究生和本科生一级开展教育活动，以便在隐私、安全和更广泛的计算机科学等关键领域建立更多的工作人员队伍。用于模糊关于谁在与谁通信、何时通信以及通信多长时间的元信息的技术不可避免地涉及增加的通信（例如，通过经由中间节点重新路由通信和/或添加诱饵消息）。这又可能导致网络拥塞和通信延迟。因此，一个具有理论和实践重要性的关键问题是了解各种隐私措施和对抗模型下网络通信中安全性和消息复杂性之间的权衡。第二个挑战是设计可证明安全和有效的匿名通信方案在现实的通信场景，如节点流失和迭代双向通信。研究小组将从沿着两个方面解决这些挑战：（1）设计路由方案，使可能被恶意节点改变的流量模式不会泄露任何元数据;（2）设计密码安全工具（例如加密洋葱）保护数据，即使网络参与者负责中继它是潜在的敌对。这个奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被视为通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，