Dependent link padding algorithms for low latency anonymity systems

Abstract

Low latency anonymity systems are susceptive to traffic analyaia attacka. In this paper, we propose a dependent link padding scheme to protect anonymity systems from traffic analysis attacks while providing a strict delay bound. The covering traffic generated by our scheme uses the minimum sending rate to provide full anonymity for a given set of flows. The relationship between user anonymity and the timinimuni covering traffic rate is then studied via analysis and simulation. When user flows are Poisson processes with the same sending rate, the rninimlsm covering traffic rate to provide full anonymity to an users is O(log m). For Pareto traffic, we show that the rate of the covering traffic converges to a constant when the number of flows goes to infinity. Finally. we use real Internet trace files to study the behavior of our algorithm when user flows have different rates. Copyright 2008 ACM.