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SUMMARY:Padded uniform random blobs: a metadata hiding format to provide d
 eniability and protection from side channel attacks.
DTSTART:20160825T140000
DTEND:20160825T160000
DTSTAMP:20260407T002743Z
UID:f2bf6bf8e754f25613a5b13272759dc25da4547a2f2cabf993056ee9
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Matthew Underwood\nEDIC Candidacy Exam\nExam President: Prof. 
 James Larus\nThesis Director: Prof. Bryan Ford\nCo-examiner: Prof. Serge V
 audenay\nBackground papers:Effective Attacks and Provable Defenses for Web
 site Fingerprinting\, by T. Wang et al.Elligator: Elliptic-curve points in
 distinguishable from uniform random\nstrings\, by D.J. Bernstein et al.Com
 pression and Information Leakage of Plaintext\, by J. KelseyAbstract\nUnen
 crypted metadata and various side channels leak a lot of unintended\ninfor
 mation. We look at website fingerprinting\, a type of traffic-analysis att
 acks on protocols that attempt to protect the privacy and anonymity of the
 ir users\, such as tor. We examine attacks that use how compression algori
 thms when combined with encryption work to gain additional information fro
 m encrypted communications. Elliptic curve cryptography is increasingly us
 ed\, but has some problems when used in conjunction with systems designed 
 to circumvent censors.\nElliptic curve points can easily be identified fro
 m an otherwise random looking traffic stream\, which potentially allows a 
 protocol to be identified and blocked. We examine ways to encode elliptic 
 curve points so they are indistinguishable from uniform random bit strings
 .\nIn this proposal we present Padded Uniform Random Blobs\, a communicati
 on system that eliminates all unencrypted metadata and reduces information
  leakage from side-channels\, like message length and timings. Then we pro
 pose how this work can be extended\, and what the next research\nsteps are
  for analyzing and improving the system.
LOCATION:BC 229 https://plan.epfl.ch/?room==BC%20229
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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