Designing Against Traffic Analysis

Traffic analysis reveals who is communicating with whom and in what way. Thus, traffic-analysis-resistant communication is an essential building block for any technical guarantee of many aspects of privacy. This talk will describe some of the traffic analysis threats to communicants on the Internet and some of the systems that have been implemented to resist traffic analysis. The focus will be primarily on systems for connection-based communication, for example, the Anonymizer, Crowds, Freedom, and in particular Onion Routing. We will define security goals for such systems and look at how the systems meet those goals.