Proactively Accountable Anonymous Messaging in Verdict

Henry Corrigan-Gibbs, David Isaac Wolinsky, and Bryan Ford
Yale University

22nd USENIX Security Symposium
August 14-16, 2013, Washington, D.C.

Abstract

Among anonymity systems, DC-nets have long held attraction for their resistance to traffic analysis attacks, but practical implementations remain vulnerable to internal disruption or “jamming” attacks, which require time-consuming detection procedures to resolve. We present Verdict, the first practical anonymous group communication system built using proactively verifiable DC-nets: participants use public-key cryptography to construct DC-net ciphertexts, and use zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge to detect and exclude misbehavior before disruption. We compare three alternative constructions for verifiable DC-nets: one using bilinear maps and two based on simpler ElGamal encryption. While verifiable DC-nets incur higher computational overheads due to the public-key cryptography involved, our experiments suggest that Verdict is practical for anonymous group messaging or microblogging applications, supporting groups of 100 clients at 1 second per round or 1000 clients at 10 seconds per round. Furthermore, we show how existing symmetric-key DC-nets can “fall back” to a verifiable DC-net to quickly identify misbehavior, speeding up previous detections schemes by two orders of magnitude.

Conference Paper: PDF
Extended Version: PDF

Slides: PowerPoint, PDF.


This material is based upon work supported by the Defense Advanced Research Agency (DARPA) and SPAWAR Systems Center Pacific, Contract No. N66001-11-C-4018. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Defense Advanced Research Agency (DARPA) and SPAWAR Systems Center Pacific.