Active Linkability Attacks
This work addresses security vulnerabilities in communication protocols for users and developers, offering foundational insights into active linkability attacks.
The paper tackles the problem of linking attacks on communication protocols by demonstrating that active attackers are more powerful than passive ones, and it provides a formal model, security definitions, and general conditions for protocol security and insecurity.
We study linking attacks on communication protocols. We show that an active attacker is strictly more powerful in this setting than previously-considered passive attackers. We introduce a formal model to reason about active linkability attacks, formally define security against these attacks and give very general conditions for both security and insecurity of protocols. In addition, we introduce a composition-like technique that allows to obtain security proofs by only studying small components of a protocol.