ObliComm: Towards building an efficient oblivious communication system

Publication Type

Journal Article

Publication Date

10-2021

Abstract

Anonymous Communication (AC) hides traffic patterns and protects message metadata from being leaked during message transmission. Many practical AC systems have been proposed aiming to reduce communication latency and support a large number of users. However, how to design AC systems which possess strong security property and at the same time achieve optimal performance (i.e., the lowest latency or highest horizontal scalability) has been a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose an ObliComm framework, which consists of six modular AC subroutines. We also present a strong security definition for AC, named oblivious communication, encompassing confidentiality, unobservability, and a new requirement sending-and-receiving operation hiding. The AC subroutines in ObliComm allow for modular construction of oblivious communication systems in different network topologies. All constructed systems satisfy oblivious communication definition and can be provably secure in the universal composability (UC) framework. Additionally, we model the relationship between the network topology and communication measurements by queuing theory, which enables the system's efficiency can be optimized and estimated by quantitative analysis and calculation. Through theoretical analyses and empirical experiments, we demonstrate the efficiency of our scheme and soundness of the queuing model.

Discipline

Digital Communications and Networking | Information Security

Research Areas

Cybersecurity

Publication

IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing

Volume

18

Issue

5

First Page

2331

Last Page

2348

ISSN

1545-5971

Identifier

10.1109/TDSC.2019.2948835

Publisher

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

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