[Metalab] today brainstorming about a new anonymity protocol?

[Michael Kafka]

ohai metalab,
(not an official security by candlelight, just feeling a little
bit like intelligent distraction)

i'll be in the lab around 19:00

i would like to get in contact with some people who can spare time
on implementing a protocol i stumbled upon a few years ago:
Drac: An Architecture for Anonymous Low-Volume Communications
(i think i already talked a few heads off in the recent months
about this, but i'm convinced it's worth a shot)

DRAC was published on several sites around 2009/2010 and suggests
an architecture for anonymous communication with some new and
promising features:

- based on peer to peer communication
- capable of low volume communication like short and instant
  messages and probably low quality voice (e.g. using the
  free speex codec @2,15kbit/s)
- communications between friends are unobservable
- communications with further contacts are anonymous
- it provides an anonymous presence service (an adversary
  taking over the presence server can't find out the identities
  of logged-in users)

Citation from the paper about proving the claims:
"Three aspects of the system are studied though simulations:
 the anonymity provided against the presence system, and the
 anonymity and unobservability of communications towards a
 global passive adversary."

Good levels of anonymity and unobservability can be reached
even for small networks with some hundred of a few thousand
nodes (good level means same success rate as random guesses).

The architecture uses hashes and epochs (roughly having a
similar effect like salted hashes) and layered encryption
similar to the onion encryption.

some papers can be found here:
http://research.google.com/pubs/archive/36335.pdf
http://homes.esat.kuleuven.be/~cdiaz/talks/Drac-Grenoble.pdf
http://homes.esat.kuleuven.be/~ctroncos/index_archivos/talks/Troncoso-Drac-Seminar.pdf
Some ideas are incorporated from APRES (Ben Laurie):
http://www.apache-ssl.org/apres.pdf

Authors are:
George Danezis (Microsoft Research)
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/gdane/

Claudia Diaz (K.U.Leuven ESAT/COSIC)
http://homes.esat.kuleuven.be/~cdiaz/

Carmela Troncoso (KU Leuven/COSIC)
http://homes.esat.kuleuven.be/~ctroncos/

Ben Laurie (The bunker, apache-ssl.org, links.org)

Greets,

MiKa