Blindspot: Indistinguishable Anonymous Communications
This addresses the need for secure anonymous communication for individuals under surveillance, though it is incremental as it builds on existing high-latency methods with a novel routing approach.
The paper tackles the problem of achieving indistinguishable and unobservable anonymous communications under global active adversaries by proposing Blindspot, which subliminally encodes messages in users' organic image-sharing behavior within social networks, and it shows reasonable performance for low-volume applications using a real-world dataset.
Communication anonymity is a key requirement for individuals under targeted surveillance. Practical anonymous communications also require indistinguishability - an adversary should be unable to distinguish between anonymised and non-anonymised traffic for a given user. We propose Blindspot, a design for high-latency anonymous communications that offers indistinguishability and unobservability under a (qualified) global active adversary. Blindspot creates anonymous routes between sender-receiver pairs by subliminally encoding messages within the pre-existing communication behaviour of users within a social network. Specifically, the organic image sharing behaviour of users. Thus channel bandwidth depends on the intensity of image sharing behaviour of users along a route. A major challenge we successfully overcome is that routing must be accomplished in the face of significant restrictions - channel bandwidth is stochastic. We show that conventional social network routing strategies do not work. To solve this problem, we propose a novel routing algorithm. We evaluate Blindspot using a real-world dataset. We find that it delivers reasonable results for applications requiring low-volume unobservable communication.