Statistical Disclosure: Improved, Extended, and Resisted
This addresses security vulnerabilities in secure communications systems, offering incremental improvements to both attack and defense methods.
The paper improves and extends the statistical disclosure attack for traffic analysis, and proposes a defense that significantly delays the attacker by requiring more observations to extract meaningful information.
Traffic analysis is a type of attack on secure communications systems, in which the adversary extracts useful patterns and information from the observed traffic. This paper improves and extends an efficient traffic analysis attack, called "statistical disclosure attack." Moreover, we propose a solution to defend against the improved (and, a fortiori, the original) statistical disclosure attack. Our solution delays the attacker considerably, meaning that he should gather significantly more observations to be able to deduce meaningful information from the traffic.