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SUMMARY:IC Colloquium : Can You Hide in an Internet Panopticon ?
DTSTART:20140310T161500
DTEND:20140310T173000
DTSTAMP:20260510T235028Z
UID:8a69edb02de221a2de92bf3476c91f4d96e91a2d5e7506a82078344b
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:By : Bryan Ford\, Yale UniversityAbstract \nMany people have l
 egitimate needs to avoid their online activities being tracked and linked 
 to their real-world identities - from citizens of authoritarian regimes\, 
 to everyday victims of domestic abuse or law enforcement officers investig
 ating organized crime.  Current state-of-the-art anonymous communication 
 systems are based on onion routing\, an approach effective against localiz
 ed adversaries with a limited ability to monitor or tamper with network tr
 affic.  In an environment of increasingly powerful and all-seeing state-l
 evel adversaries\, however\, onion routing is showing cracks\, and may not
  offer reliable security for much longer.  All current anonymity systems 
 are vulnerable in varying degrees to five major classes of attacks: global
  passive traffic analysis\, active attacks\, "denial-of-security" or DoSec
  attacks\, intersection attacks\, and software exploits.\nThe Dissent proj
 ect is prototyping a next-generation anonymity system representing a groun
 d-up redesign of current approaches.  Dissent is the first anonymity and 
 pseudonymity architecture incorporating protection against the five major 
 classes of known attacks.  By switching from onion routing to alternate a
 nonymity primitives offering provable resistance to traffic analysis\, Dis
 sent makes anonymity possible even against an adversary who can monitor mo
 st\, or all\, network communication.  A collective control plane renders 
 a group of participants in an online community indistinguishable even if a
 n adversary interferes actively\, such as by delaying messages or forcing 
 users offline. Protocol-level accountability enables groups to identify an
 d expel misbehaving nodes\, preserving availability\, and preventing adver
 saries from using denial-of-service attacks to weaken anonymity.  The sys
 tem computes anonymity metrics that give users realistic indicators of ano
 nymity protection\, even against adversaries capable of long-term intersec
 tion and statistical disclosure attacks\, and gives users control over tra
 deoffs between anonymity loss and communication responsiveness.  Finally\
 , virtual machine isolation offers anonymity protection against browser so
 ftware exploits of the kind recently employed to de-anonymize Tor users  
 While Dissent is still a proof-of-concept prototype with important functio
 nality and performance limitations\, preliminary evidence suggests that it
  may in principle be possible - though by no means easy - to hide in an In
 ternet panopticon.Biography\nBryan Ford leads the Decentralized/Distribute
 d Systems (DeDiS) research group at Yale University.  His work focuses br
 oadly on building secure systems\, touching on many particular topics incl
 uding secure and certified OS kernels\, parallel and distributed computing
 \, privacy-preserving technologies\, and Internet architecture.  He has r
 eceived the Jay Lepreau Best Paper Award at OSDI\, and multiple grants fro
 m NSF\, DARPA\, and ONR\, including the NSF CAREER award.  His pedagogica
 l achievements include PIOS\, the first OS course framework leading studen
 ts through development of a working\, native multiprocessor OS kernel.  P
 rof. Ford earned his B.S. at the University of Utah and his Ph.D. at MIT\,
  while researching topics including mobile device naming and routing\, vir
 tualization\, microkernel architectures\, and touching on programming lang
 uages and formal methods.More information
LOCATION:BC 420 https://plan.epfl.ch/?room==BC%20420
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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