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Effect of Group Based Synchronization on User Anonymity in Mix Networks

Published: 29 August 2023 Publication History

Abstract

In so-called closed environments, the MIX network can theoretically provide perfect security, i.e. if perfect protection is envisaged, all senders and receivers should be perfectly synchronized and participate equally in each communication round of the MIX technique. In the context of open environments (e.g., the Internet), there is no synchronization between the participants and here the technique is vulnerable to known analyses such as (statistical) disclosure attacks. In short, the Mix technology is highly dependent on its application context in which it involves the participants. In this work, we study the effect of context in terms of synchronization rate, present two different synchronization approaches and evaluate their protection against disclosure attacks.

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    ARES '23: Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security
    August 2023
    1440 pages
    ISBN:9798400707728
    DOI:10.1145/3600160
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Published: 29 August 2023

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    Author Tags

    1. anonymity
    2. disclosure attacks.
    3. mix-networks
    4. traffic analysis

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