Mitigating Intersection Attacks in Anonymous Microblogging
Abstract
Anonymous microblogging systems are known to be vulnerable to intersection attacks due to network churn. An adversary that monitors all communications can leverage the churn to learn who is publishing what with increasing confidence over time. In this paper, we propose a protocol for mitigating intersection attacks in anonymous microblogging systems by grouping users into anonymity sets based on similarities in their publishing behavior. The protocol provides a configurable communication schedule for users in each set to manage the inevitable trade-off between latency and bandwidth overhead. In our evaluation, we use real-world datasets from two popular microblogging platforms, Twitter and Reddit, to simulate user publishing behavior. The results demonstrate that the protocol can protect users against intersection attacks at low bandwidth overhead when the users adhere to communication schedules. In addition, the protocol can sustain a slow degradation in the size of the anonymity set over time under various churn rates.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2307.09069,
title = {Mitigating Intersection Attacks in Anonymous Microblogging},
author = {Sarah Abdelwahab Gaballah and Thanh Hoang Long Nguyen and Lamya Abdullah and Ephraim Zimmer and Max Mühlhäuser},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.09069},
year = {2023}
}