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IFIP International Conference on Autonomous Infrastructure, Management and Security

AIMS 2012: Dependable Networks and Services pp 98–108Cite as

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Instant Degradation of Anonymity in Low-Latency Anonymisation Systems

Instant Degradation of Anonymity in Low-Latency Anonymisation Systems

  • Thorsten Ries20,
  • Radu State20 &
  • Thomas Engel20 
  • Conference paper
  • 1045 Accesses

Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCCN,volume 7279)

Abstract

Low-latency anonymisation systems are very popular, both in academic research and in operational environments. Several attacks against these systems exist aiming to reveal the identity of a particular user, mostly by trying to assign the real IP address of the sender to a known connection. Nevertheless, the hidden identity of a user is not only based on the IP address, also location information can be of relevance. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach to instantly disclose the location of users based on Round Trip Time measurements. Even if the identity of a user can not be revealed, the correlated location information may already provide sufficient information to degrade the level of anonymity significantly. Our attack is based on virtual network coordinate systems, mapping physical nodes to a n-dimensional space to reveal a geographical proximity. Taking advantage of this feature, we define a model that leverages network coordinates based on only a single connection of a user to a malicious website for instance. Evaluation on the Planet-Lab research network proves that by the use of our proposed model a local attacker has good chance to disclose the location of a user and to utilise this information to create an low-latency anonymity system independent anonymity measure.

Keywords

  • Autonomous System
  • Round Trip Time
  • Malicious Node
  • Entry Node
  • Anonymisation System

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg

    Thorsten Ries, Radu State & Thomas Engel

Authors
  1. Thorsten Ries
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  2. Radu State
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  3. Thomas Engel
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, and Computer Science, University of Twente, P.O. Box 217, 7500 AE, Enschede, The Netherlands

    Ramin Sadre

  2. Institute of Computer Science, Masaryk University, Botanická 68a, 602 00, Brno, Czech Republic

    Jiří Novotný & Pavel Čeleda & 

  3. Institut für Informatik (IFI), Universität Zürich, Binzmühlestraße 14, 8050, Zürich, Switzerland

    Martin Waldburger

  4. Institut für Informatik (IFI), Universität Zürich, Binzmühlestrasse 14, 8050, Zürich, Switzerland

    Burkhard Stiller

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© 2012 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing

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Cite this paper

Ries, T., State, R., Engel, T. (2012). Instant Degradation of Anonymity in Low-Latency Anonymisation Systems. In: Sadre, R., Novotný, J., Čeleda, P., Waldburger, M., Stiller, B. (eds) Dependable Networks and Services. AIMS 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7279. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30633-4_12

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