![]() ![]() “Riffle aims to provide as much traffic analysis resistance as possible.” “Tor aims to provide the lowest latency possible, which opens it up to certain attacks,” wrote Kwon in an email to TechCrunch. They might not be able to tell exactly what is being sent, but they can put together a breadcrumb trail tying a user to traffic coming out of an exit node - at least, that’s the theory.Ī team of researchers led by MIT grad student Albert Kwon (with help from EPFL) aims to leapfrog Tor’s anonymizing technique with a brand new platform called Riffle. The potential problem with Tor is that if an adversary gets enough nodes on the network, they can work together to track the progress of packets. A new anonymizing protocol from MIT may prove more resilient against such determined and deep-pocketed attackers. ![]() A mixnet used with onion encryption is protected against passive adversaries, which can only observe network traffic.Tor has been the go-to for anonymous communication online for years now - and that has made it one of the juiciest targets possible to the likes of the NSA and FBI. But active adversaries, which can infiltrate servers with their own code, are another matter. If one has commandeered a mixnet router and wants to determine the destination of a particular message, for instance, it could simply replace all the other messages it receives with its own, bound for a single destination. Then it could passively track the one message that doesn’t follow its own prespecified route. That's where Riffle's third protective measure comes in. Essentially, it takes a two-pronged approach to validating the authenticity of messages using techniques called verifiable shuffle and authentication encryption. Verifiable shuffle keeps things secure while each user and each mixnet server agree upon a cryptographic key authentication encryption, which is much more efficient, then takes over for the remainder of the communication session. The overall result is that Riffle remains cryptographically secure as long as one server in the mixnet remains uncompromised, according to MIT. Meanwhile, Riffle also uses bandwidth much more efficiently than competing systems, its creators say. In experiments, it required only one-tenth as much time as similarly secure experimental systems to transfer a large file between anonymous users. Riffle was developed by researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. The system isn't yet available for public use, but the researchers will present a paper describing their work at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium in Germany next week.MIT am an Edwin Sibley Webster Professor ofĮlectrical Engineering and Computer ScienceĬomputer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). I belong to the Computation Structures Group. My current research interests are primarily in the areas of applied cryptography, computer security and computer architecture. Recent work: My group pointed out vulnerabilities in anonymizing networks, including using deep learning for website fingerprinting, and designed Riffle, Atom, Crossroads, and Spectrum, systems with strong anonymity. We developed append only authenticated dictionaries that can be used to build transparency logs, scalable threshold cryptosystems, techniques for lightweight private similarity search, and cryptographically-verified databases. ![]() Our work in Byzantine Broadcast (BB) resulted in sublinear-time protocols under dishonest majority for static and strongly adaptive adversaries. Prior projects at the intersection of applied cryptography and computer architecture in my group include designing a secure processor Ascend that allows untrusted programs to compute on encrypted data from a client without leaking information about the data. Ascend was integrated with the Princeton Piton multicore processor and RIFFLE MIT VERIFICATIONĪscend uses Path ORAM with optimizations and integrity verification to obfuscate memory address patterns. ![]()
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