Related papers: Tor circuit fingerprinting defenses using adaptive…
An attacker can gain information of a user by analyzing its network traffic. The size of transferred data leaks information about the file being transferred or the service being used, and this is particularly revealing when the attacker has…
The DDoS attack landscape is growing at an unprecedented pace. Inspired by the recent advances in optical networking, we make a case for optical layer-aware DDoS defense (O-LAD) in this paper. Our approach leverages the optical layer to…
Friend-to-friend (F2F) overlays, which restrict direct communication to mutually trusted parties, are a promising substrate for privacy-preserving communication due to their inherent membership-concealment and Sybil-resistance. Yet,…
Privacy technologies have become extremely prevalent in recent years from secure communication channels to the Tor network. These technologies were designed to provide privacy and security for users, but these ideals have also led to…
Tor is a popular low-latency anonymity network. However, Tor does not protect against the exploitation of an insecure application to reveal the IP address of, or trace, a TCP stream. In addition, because of the linkability of Tor streams…
Anonymous VoIP calls over the Internet holds great significance for privacy-conscious users, whistle-blowers and political activists alike. Prior research deems popular anonymization systems like Tor unsuitable for providing requisite…
Nodes in route-restricted overlays have an immutable set of neighbors, explicitly specified by their users. Popular examples include payment networks such as the Lightning network as well as social overlays such as the Dark Freenet. Routing…
The Lightning Network is a scaling solution for Bitcoin that promises to enable rapid and private payment processing. In Lightning, multi-hop payments are secured by utilizing Hashed Time-Locked Contracts (HTLCs) and encrypted on the…
Real-world data is usually segmented by attributes and distributed across different parties. Federated learning empowers collaborative training without exposing local data or models. As we demonstrate through designed attacks, even with a…
In pervasive systems, mobile devices and other sensors access Gateways, which are Servers that communicate with the devices, provide low latency services, connect them with each other, and connect them to the Internet and backbone networks.…
While privacy-focused browsers have taken steps to block third-party cookies and mitigate browser fingerprinting, novel tracking techniques that can bypass existing countermeasures continue to emerge. Since trackers need to share…
Not only the free web is victim to China's excessive censorship, but also the Tor anonymity network: the Great Firewall of China prevents thousands of potential Tor users from accessing the network. In this paper, we investigate how the…
Over the past decade, the Bitcoin P2P network protocol has become a reference model for all modern cryptocurrencies. While nodes in this network are known, the connections among them are kept hidden, as it is commonly believed that this…
Quantitative Information Flow (QIF) provides a robust information-theoretical framework for designing secure systems with minimal information leakage. While previous research has addressed the design of such systems under hard constraints…
Browser fingerprinting is a pervasive online tracking technique used increasingly often for profiling and targeted advertising. Prior research on the prevalence of fingerprinting heavily relied on automated web crawls, which inherently…
Most machine learning applications rely on centralized learning processes, opening up the risk of exposure of their training datasets. While federated learning (FL) mitigates to some extent these privacy risks, it relies on a trusted…
Full-packet encryption is a technique used by modern evasive Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to avoid protocol-based flagging from censorship models by disguising their traffic as random noise on the network. Traditional methods for…
Several recently proposed censorship circumvention systems use encrypted network channels of popular applications to hide their communications. For example, a Tor pluggable transport called Snowflake uses the WebRTC data channel, while a…
Approximate circuits often achieve exceptional trade-offs between computational accuracy and hardware efficiency, making them attractive for deployment as reusable Intellectual Property (IP) cores. However, safeguarding such circuits…
This articles surveys the existing literature on the methods currently used by web services to track the user online as well as their purposes, implications, and possible user's defenses. A significant majority of reviewed articles and web…