Compulsion Resistant Anonymous Communications

We study the effect compulsion attacks, through which an adversary can request a decryption or key from an honest node, have on the security of mix based anonymous communication systems. Some specific countermeasures are proposed that increase the cost of compulsion attacks, detect that tracing is taking place and ultimately allow for some anonymity to be preserved even when all nodes are under compulsion. Going beyond the case when a single message is traced, we also analyze the effect of multiple messages being traced and devise some techniques that could retain some anonymity. Our analysis highlights that we can reason about plausible deniability in terms of the information theoretic anonymity metrics.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: IH
• Authors: George Danezis, Jolyon Clulow
• Keywords: Anonymous Communication Systems, Compulsion Attacks, Effect Compulsion Attacks, IH 2005