| Title | Anonymity Mixes as (Partial) Assembly Queues: Modeling and Analysis |
| Publication Type | Conference Paper |
| Year of Publication | 2019 |
| Authors | Aktaş, Mehmet Fatih, Soljanin, Emina |
| Conference Name | 2019 IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW) |
| Keywords | anonymity, anonymity metrics, anonymity mixes, anonymity platforms route, batch mix, Chaum mixes, communicating users, composability, delay analysis, delay properties, Human Behavior, Metrics, Order statistics., particular anonymize, pubcrawl, queueing model, queueing theory, randomized batch mixing strategy, resilience, Resiliency, telecommunication network routing, telecommunication security, telecommunication traffic, traffic disruption techniques |
| Abstract | Anonymity platforms route the traffic over a network of special routers that are known as mixes and implement various traffic disruption techniques to hide the communicating users' identities. Batch mixes in particular anonymize communicating peers by allowing message exchange to take place only after a sufficient number of messages (a batch) accumulate, thus introducing delay. We introduce a queueing model for batch mix and study its delay properties. Our analysis shows that delay of a batch mix grows quickly as the batch size gets close to the number of senders connected to the mix. We then propose a randomized batch mixing strategy and show that it achieves much better delay scaling in terms of the batch size. However, randomization is shown to reduce the anonymity preserving capabilities of the mix. We also observe that queueing models are particularly useful to study anonymity metrics that are more practically relevant such as the time-to-deanonymize metric. |
| DOI | 10.1109/ITW44776.2019.8989236 |
| Citation Key | aktas_anonymity_2019 |
Anonymity Mixes as (Partial) Assembly Queues: Modeling and Analysis