| Title | HSDC–Net: Secure Anonymous Messaging in Online Social Networks |
| Publication Type | Conference Paper |
| Year of Publication | 2019 |
| Authors | Nosouhi, Mohammad Reza, Yu, Shui, Sood, Keshav, Grobler, Marthie |
| Conference Name | 2019 18th IEEE International Conference On Trust, Security And Privacy In Computing And Communications/13th IEEE International Conference On Big Data Science And Engineering (TrustCom/BigDataSE) |
| Keywords | anonymization, anonymous communications, anonymous messaging, Australia, blockchain users, computer network security, cryptographic protocols, cryptography, data privacy, DC-net suffers, DC–net, dining cryptographers network protocol, disruption management, disruption management subprotocols, hiding contents, HSDC-net achieves low latencies, HSDC-net protocol, Internet, message publishing, message senders, messaging application providers, online social networks, practical protocol, privacy, protocol design, Protocols, pubcrawl, resilience, Resiliency, Scalability, SDC-net, secure anonymous messaging, security issues, Servers, short stability issue, social networking (online), strongest anonymity guarantees, trust ISP |
| Abstract | Hiding contents of users' messages has been successfully addressed before, while anonymization of message senders remains a challenge since users do not usually trust ISPs and messaging application providers. To resolve this challenge, several solutions have been proposed so far. Among them, the Dining Cryptographers network protocol (DC-net) provides the strongest anonymity guarantees. However, DC-net suffers from two critical issues that makes it impractical, i.e., (1) collision possibility and (2) vulnerability against disruptions. Apart from that, we noticed a third critical issue during our investigation. (3) DC-net users can be deanonymized after they publish at least three messages. We name this problem the short stability issue and prove that anonymity is provided only for a few cycles of message publishing. As far as we know, this problem has not been identified in the previous research works. In this paper, we propose Harmonized and Stable DC-net (HSDC-net), a self-organizing protocol for anonymous communications. In our protocol design, we first resolve the short stability issue and obtain SDC-net, a stable extension of DC-net. Then, we integrate the Slot Reservation and Disruption Management sub-protocols into SDC-net to overcome the collision and security issues, respectively. The obtained HSDC-net protocol can also be integrated into blockchain-based cryptocurrencies (e.g. Bitcoin) to mix multiple transactions (belonging to different users) into a single transaction in such a way that the source of each payment is unknown. This preserves privacy of blockchain users. Our prototype implementation shows that HSDC-net achieves low latencies that makes it a practical protocol. |
| DOI | 10.1109/TrustCom/BigDataSE.2019.00054 |
| Citation Key | nosouhi_hsdcnet_2019 |
HSDC–Net: Secure Anonymous Messaging in Online Social Networks