Filter Design for Delay-Based Anonymous Communication Systems. Simon Oya, Fernando Pérez-González, and Carmela Troncoso. In IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), pp. 2107-2111, 2017. [Poster]
Anonymous Communications
Nowadays, most Internet communications are encrypted, which is great! However, even if your data is encrypted, it is not hard for an adversary to tell where your traffic is going (e.g., that particular website you are visiting). To hide who talks with whom over the Internet (and other meta-data), we need anonymous communications systems. Tor is the most successful of such systems, but there is another type of systems, less known, called mixnets. Mixnets aim to protect against a global passive adversary, which is something that even Tor cannot do. While mixnets were conceived a long time ago, their deployments are very recent.
My research in mixnets focuses on understanding and quantifying the privacy guarantees that they provide. In the past, I have done this from a theoretical perspective, using statistics and signal processing techniques. Recently, we have seen some actual deployments of mixnets (e.g., Nym), and I would love to study the privacy of these specific systems!
Below are my papers on the topic. If you are a student looking for one paper to read on this topic, start with my first paper ever (only four pages, and enough math to scare you off). If you enjoyed that and want to read more math, also give this one a read.
Publications
Design of Pool Mixes Against Profiling Attacks in Real Conditions. Simon Oya, Fernando Pérez-González, and Carmela Troncoso. In IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TNET), vol. 24, no. 6, pp. 3662-3675, 2016.
Understanding the Effects of Real-World Behavior in Statistical Disclosure Attacks. Simon Oya, Carmela Troncoso, and Fernando Pérez-González. In International Workshop on Information Forensics and Security (WIFS), pp. 72-77, 2014. [Slides]
Do Dummies Pay Off? Limits of Dummy Traffic Protection in Anonymous Communications. Simon Oya, Carmela Troncoso, and Fernando Pérez-González. In International Symposium on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETS), pp. 204-223, 2014. [Technical Report] [Slides]
A Least Squares Approach to the Static Traffic Analysis of High-Latency Anonymous Communication Systems. Fernando Pérez-González, Carmela Troncoso, and Simon Oya. In IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS), vol. 9, no. 9, pp. 1341-1355, 2014. [Technical Report]
Meet the Family of Statistical Disclosure Attacks. Simon Oya, Carmela Troncoso, and Fernando Pérez-González. In IEEE Global Conference on Signal and Information Processing (GlobalSIP), pp. 223-236, 2013. [Poster]