HSDC-Net: Secure anonymous messaging in online social networks

Nosouhi, MR; Yu, S; Sood, K; Grobler, M

HSDC-Net: Secure anonymous messaging in online social networks

Nosouhi, MR Yu, S

Sood, K Grobler, M

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Publisher:: IEEE
Publication Type:: Conference Proceeding
Citation:: Proceedings - 2019 18th IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications/13th IEEE International Conference on Big Data Science and Engineering, TrustCom/BigDataSE 2019, 2019, pp. 350-357
Issue Date:: 2019-08-01

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Field	Value	Language
dc.contributor.author	Nosouhi, MR
dc.contributor.author	Yu, S https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4485-6743
dc.contributor.author	Sood, K
dc.contributor.author	Grobler, M
dc.date	2019-08-05
dc.date.accessioned	2020-06-21T02:02:20Z
dc.date.available	2020-06-21T02:02:20Z
dc.date.issued	2019-08-01
dc.identifier.citation	Proceedings - 2019 18th IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications/13th IEEE International Conference on Big Data Science and Engineering, TrustCom/BigDataSE 2019, 2019, pp. 350-357
dc.identifier.isbn	9781728127767
dc.identifier.issn	2324-898X
dc.identifier.issn	2324-9013
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/10453/141598
dc.description.abstract	© 2019 IEEE. Hiding contents of users' messages has been successfully addressed before, while anonymization of message senders remains a challenge since users do not usually trust ISPs and messaging application providers. To resolve this challenge, several solutions have been proposed so far. Among them, the Dining Cryptographers network protocol (DC-net) provides the strongest anonymity guarantees. However, DC-net suffers from two critical issues that makes it impractical, i.e., (1) collision possibility and (2) vulnerability against disruptions. Apart from that, we noticed a third critical issue during our investigation. (3) DC-net users can be deanonymized after they publish at least three messages. We name this problem the short stability issue and prove that anonymity is provided only for a few cycles of message publishing. As far as we know, this problem has not been identified in the previous research works. In this paper, we propose Harmonized and Stable DC-net (HSDC-net), a self-organizing protocol for anonymous communications. In our protocol design, we first resolve the short stability issue and obtain SDC-net, a stable extension of DC-net. Then, we integrate the Slot Reservation and Disruption Management sub-protocols into SDC-net to overcome the collision and security issues, respectively. The obtained HSDC-net protocol can also be integrated into blockchain-based cryptocurrencies (e.g. Bitcoin) to mix multiple transactions (belonging to different users) into a single transaction in such a way that the source of each payment is unknown. This preserves privacy of blockchain users. Our prototype implementation shows that HSDC-net achieves low latencies that makes it a practical protocol.
dc.language	en
dc.publisher	IEEE
dc.relation	Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation
dc.relation.ispartof	Proceedings - 2019 18th IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications/13th IEEE International Conference on Big Data Science and Engineering, TrustCom/BigDataSE 2019
dc.relation.ispartof	IEEE International Conference On Trust, Security And Privacy In Computing And Communications/13th IEEE International Conference On Big Data Science And Engineering
dc.relation.isbasedon	10.1109/TrustCom/BigDataSE.2019.00054
dc.rights	info:eu-repo/semantics/closedAccess
dc.rights	© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.	en_US
dc.title	HSDC-Net: Secure anonymous messaging in online social networks
dc.type	Conference Proceeding
utslib.location.activity	Rotorua, New Zealand
utslib.for	0805 Distributed Computing
pubs.organisational-group	/University of Technology Sydney/Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology
pubs.organisational-group	/University of Technology Sydney
utslib.copyright.status	closed_access	*
pubs.consider-herdc	false
dc.date.updated	2020-06-21T02:02:14Z
pubs.finish-date	2019-08-08
pubs.place-of-publication	Piscataway, USA
pubs.publication-status	Published
pubs.start-date	2019-08-05
dc.location	Piscataway, USA

Abstract:

© 2019 IEEE. Hiding contents of users' messages has been successfully addressed before, while anonymization of message senders remains a challenge since users do not usually trust ISPs and messaging application providers. To resolve this challenge, several solutions have been proposed so far. Among them, the Dining Cryptographers network protocol (DC-net) provides the strongest anonymity guarantees. However, DC-net suffers from two critical issues that makes it impractical, i.e., (1) collision possibility and (2) vulnerability against disruptions. Apart from that, we noticed a third critical issue during our investigation. (3) DC-net users can be deanonymized after they publish at least three messages. We name this problem the short stability issue and prove that anonymity is provided only for a few cycles of message publishing. As far as we know, this problem has not been identified in the previous research works. In this paper, we propose Harmonized and Stable DC-net (HSDC-net), a self-organizing protocol for anonymous communications. In our protocol design, we first resolve the short stability issue and obtain SDC-net, a stable extension of DC-net. Then, we integrate the Slot Reservation and Disruption Management sub-protocols into SDC-net to overcome the collision and security issues, respectively. The obtained HSDC-net protocol can also be integrated into blockchain-based cryptocurrencies (e.g. Bitcoin) to mix multiple transactions (belonging to different users) into a single transaction in such a way that the source of each payment is unknown. This preserves privacy of blockchain users. Our prototype implementation shows that HSDC-net achieves low latencies that makes it a practical protocol.

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http://hdl.handle.net/10453/141598