Towards anonymous and metadata private communication at Internet scale

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2019

Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Kwon, Young Hyun.
Other Authors: Srinivas Devadas.
Format: Thesis
Language:eng
Published: Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2019
Subjects:
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/122555
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author Kwon, Young Hyun.
author2 Srinivas Devadas.
author_facet Srinivas Devadas.
Kwon, Young Hyun.
author_sort Kwon, Young Hyun.
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description Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2019
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spelling mit-1721.1/1225552019-10-14T03:02:00Z Towards anonymous and metadata private communication at Internet scale Kwon, Young Hyun. Srinivas Devadas. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2019 Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. Includes bibliographical references (pages 111-121). As the world becomes more connected, privacy is becoming harder to maintain. From social media services to Internet service providers to state-sponsored mass-surveillance programs, many outlets collect sensitive information about the users and the communication between them - often without the users ever knowing about it. In response, many Internet users have turned to end-to-end encryption, like Signal and TLS, to protect the content of the communication. Unfortunately, these works do little to hide the metadata of the communication, such as when and with whom a user is communicating. In scenarios where the metadata are sensitive, encryption alone is not sufficient to ensure users' privacy. Most prior communication systems that provide metadata privacy fall into one of two categories: (1) systems that provide formal privacy guarantees against global adversaries but do not scale to large numbers of users, or (2) systems that scale easily to a large user base but do not provide strong guarantees against global adversaries. In this thesis, I will present three systems that aim to bridge the gap between the two categories to enable private communication with strong guarantees for many millions of users. First, I will present Atom, a horizontally scalable anonymous broadcast system for short messages that defends against a global adversary who monitors the entire network and controls a significant fraction of the servers while scaling easily by adding more servers to its network. Then, I will present Quark, another horizontally scalable anonymous broadcast system that trades bandwidth for latency to achieve more than an order of magnitude speed-up over Atom under the same threat model. Finally, I will present XRD, which provides metadata private communication between two honest users against the same adversary using a novel cryptographic primitive called aggregate hybrid shuffle. by Young Hyun Kwon. Ph. D. Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science 2019-10-11T22:11:51Z 2019-10-11T22:11:51Z 2019 2019 Thesis https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/122555 1122780065 eng MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582 134 pages application/pdf Massachusetts Institute of Technology
spellingShingle Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Kwon, Young Hyun.
Towards anonymous and metadata private communication at Internet scale
title Towards anonymous and metadata private communication at Internet scale
title_full Towards anonymous and metadata private communication at Internet scale
title_fullStr Towards anonymous and metadata private communication at Internet scale
title_full_unstemmed Towards anonymous and metadata private communication at Internet scale
title_short Towards anonymous and metadata private communication at Internet scale
title_sort towards anonymous and metadata private communication at internet scale
topic Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
url https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/122555
work_keys_str_mv AT kwonyounghyun towardsanonymousandmetadataprivatecommunicationatinternetscale