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A Quantitative Analysis of Anonymous Communications
This paper aims to quantitatively analyze anonymous communication systems with regard to anonymity properties. Various anonymous communication systems have been designed and implemented. However, there are few formal and quantitative analyses on how these systems perform. System developers often informally argued the security goals which their systems can achieve. Such results were likely vague and not persuasive. In this paper, we use a probabilistic method to investigate the anonymity behavior of anonymous communication systems. In particular, we study the probability that the true identity of a sender can be discovered in an anonymous communication system given that some nodes have been compromised. It is through this analysis that we can identify a number of design guidelines for systems aimed at providing communication anonymity. For example, contrary to what one would intuitively expect, our analytic results show that the probability that the true identity of a sender can be discovered may not always decrease as the length of communication path increases. We also found that the complexity of path topology does not have significant impact in terms of anonymity behavior.
author = {Yong Guan and Xinwen Fu and Riccardo Bettati and Wei Zhao},
title = {A Quantitative Analysis of Anonymous Communications},
year = {2001},
address = {Washington, D.C.},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = aug
}
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