MorphIT: Morphing Packet Reports for Internet Transparency
Georgia Fragkouli, Katerina Argyraki, and Bryan Ford
EPFL
Winner of Applied Networking Research Prize (ANRP)
Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies
May 4, 2019.
Abstract:
Can we improve Internet transparency without worsening user anonymity? For a
long time, researchers have been proposing transparency systems, where traffic
reports produced at strategic network points help assess network behavior and
verify service-level agreements or neutrality compliance. However, such reports
necessarily reveal when certain traffic appeared at a certain network point,
and this information could, in principle, be used to compromise low-latency
anonymity networks like Tor. In this paper, we examine whether more Internet
transparency necessarily means less anonymity. We start from the information
that a basic transparency solution would publish about a network and study how
that would impact the anonymity of the network's users. Then we study how to
change, in real time, the time granularity of traffic reports in order to
preserve both user anonymity and report utility. We evaluate with real and
synthetic data and show that our algorithm can offer a good anonymity/utility
balance, even in adversarial scenarios where aggregates consist of very few
flows.
Paper:
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