Proactively Accountable Anonymous Messaging in Verdict

Henry Corrigan-Gibbs,D. Wolinsky,B. Ford

Published 2012 in USENIX Security Symposium

ABSTRACT

Among anonymity systems, DC-nets have long held attraction for their resistance to traffic analysis attacks, but practical implementations remain vulnerable to internal disruption or "jamming" attacks, which require time-consuming detection procedures to resolve. We present Verdict, the first practical anonymous group communication system built using proactively verifiable DC-nets: participants use public-key cryptography to construct DC-net ciphertexts, and use zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge to detect and exclude misbehavior before disruption. We compare three alternative constructions for verifiable DC-nets: one using bilinear maps and two based on simpler ElGamal encryption. While verifiable DC-nets incur higher computational overheads due to the public-key cryptography involved, our experiments suggest that Verdict is practical for anonymous group messaging or microblogging applications, supporting groups of 100 clients at 1 second per round or 1000 clients at 10 seconds per round. Furthermore, we show how existing symmetric-key DC-nets can "fall back" to a verifiable DC-net to quickly identify misbehavior, speeding up previous detections schemes by two orders of magnitude.

PUBLICATION RECORD

  • Publication year

    2012

  • Venue

    USENIX Security Symposium

  • Publication date

    2012-09-21

  • Fields of study

    Computer Science

  • Identifiers
  • External record

    Open on Semantic Scholar

  • Source metadata

    Semantic Scholar

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