ObliComm: Towards Building an Efficient Oblivious Communication System

Anonymous Communication (AC) hides traffic patterns and protects message metadata from being leaked during message transmission. Many practical AC systems have been proposed aiming to reduce communication latency and support a large number of users. However, how to design AC systems which possess st...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on dependable and secure computing 2021-09, Vol.18 (5), p.2331-2348
Main Authors: Wu, Pengfei, Deng, Robert H., Shen, Qingni, Liu, Ximeng, Li, Qi, Wu, Zhonghai
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Anonymous communication
Communication
Communication systems
Communications systems
Communications traffic
Empirical analysis
horizontal scaling
Metadata
Modular construction
modular framework
Network topologies
Network topology
Queuing theory
Receivers
Scalability
Security
Servers
Subroutines
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Summary:Anonymous Communication (AC) hides traffic patterns and protects message metadata from being leaked during message transmission. Many practical AC systems have been proposed aiming to reduce communication latency and support a large number of users. However, how to design AC systems which possess strong security property and at the same time achieve optimal performance (i.e., the lowest latency or highest horizontal scalability) has been a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose an ObliComm framework, which consists of six modular AC subroutines. We also present a strong security definition for AC, named oblivious communication, encompassing confidentiality, unobservability, and a new requirement sending-and-receiving operation hiding. The AC subroutines in ObliComm allow for modular construction of oblivious communication systems in different network topologies. All constructed systems satisfy oblivious communication definition and can be provably secure in the universal composability (UC) framework. Additionally, we model the relationship between the network topology and communication measurements by queuing theory, which enables the system's efficiency can be optimized and estimated by quantitative analysis and calculation. Through theoretical analyses and empirical experiments, we demonstrate the efficiency of our scheme and soundness of the queuing model.
ISSN:1545-5971
1941-0018
DOI:10.1109/TDSC.2019.2948835