EAGER: Towards Next Generation Anonymous Communication Networks

在过去的十年里，由于对互联网通信隐私问题的担忧，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很好地保护通信隐私，但这些网络，特别是低延迟匿名通信网络，容易受到一些流量分析攻击。本项目的主要目标是研究新的匿名通信体系结构，以对抗流量分析攻击，包括被动和主动流量分析攻击。该项目致力于通过网络编码来耗散网络流量的统计结构信息来隐藏流量模式，这是以前从未尝试过的。与现有方法相比，新方法将能够隐藏流量模式，同时实现更高的带宽效率和更少的服务质量下降。匿名网络的科学基础是通过了解和分析匿名级别、网络的可用性和所需的网络资源量之间的复杂关系来建立的。鉴于计算和通信环境的日益普及性和匿名网络的日益普及，保护各种互联网应用的通信隐私和隐私具有重要的社会意义。该项目还作为一种手段，向少数族裔学生介绍学术研究活动，并吸引更多的本科生和研究生从事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.