Communication Channel Anonymity

Synonyms

Relationship anonymity

Definition

Communication channel anonymity is achieved in a messaging system if an eavesdropper who picks up messages from the communication line of a sender and the communication line of a recipient cannot tell with better probability than pure guesswork whether the sent message is the same as the received message. During the attack, the eavesdropper may also listen on all communication lines of the network, and he may also send and receive his own messages. It is clear that all messages in such a network must be encrypted to the same length in order to keep the attacker from distinguishing different messages by their content or length.

Communication channel anonymity implies either sender anonymity or recipient anonymity [4].

Communication channel anonymity can be achieved against computationally restricted eavesdroppers by MIX networks [1] and against computationally unrestricted eavesdroppers by DC networks [2,  3].

Note that communication channel...