Unmixing Mix Traffic [chapter]

Ye Zhu, Riccardo Bettati
2006 Lecture Notes in Computer Science  
We apply blind source separation techniques from statistical signal processing to separate the traffic in a mix network into either individual flows or groups of flows. This separation requires no a priori information about the individual flows. As a result, unlinkability can be compromised without ever observing individual flows. Our experiments show that this attack is effective and scalable. By correlating separated groups of flows across nodes, a passive attacker can get an accurate traffic
more » ... map of the mix network. We use a non-trivial network to show that the combined attack works. The experiments also show that multicast traffic can be dangerous for anonymity networks.
doi:10.1007/11767831_8 fatcat:vfubvdc57rdftkqvxvfqsad23y