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Atom: Horizontally Scaling Strong Anonymity
Name
1612.07841.pdf
Description
Accepted version
Size
795.03 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
1931c4c8ad21b95efbaf74c9a83a1bd9
Author(s)
Kwon, Albert
Corrigan-Gibbs, Henry
Devadas, Srinivas
Ford, Bryan
Date Issued
October 2017
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Citation
Kwon, Albert, Corrigan-Gibbs, Henry, Devadas, Srinivas and Ford, Bryan. 2017. "Atom: Horizontally Scaling Strong Anonymity."
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
© 2017 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to Association for Computing Machinery. Atom is an anonymous messaging system that protects against traffic-analysis attacks. Unlike many prior systems, each Atom server touches only a small fraction of the total messages routed through the network. As a result, the system’s capacity scales near-linearly with the number of servers. At the same time, each Atom user benefits from “best possible” anonymity: a user is anonymous among all honest users of the system, even against an active adversary who monitors the entire network, a portion of the system’s servers, and any number of malicious users. The architectural ideas behind Atom have been known in theory, but putting them into practice requires new techniques for (1) avoiding heavy general-purpose multi-party computation protocols, (2) defeating active attacks by malicious servers at minimal performance cost, and (3) handling server failure and churn. Atom is most suitable for sending a large number of short messages, as in a microblogging application or a high-security communication bootstrapping (“dialing”) for private messaging systems. We show that, on a heterogeneous network of 1,024 servers, Atom can transit a million Tweet-length messages in 28 minutes. This is over 23× faster than prior systems with similar privacy guarantees.
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
10.1145/3132747.3132755
