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The added noise reminds me of WASTE, which was infamously created by Justin Frankel at Nullsoft to protest the post-acquisition atmosphere at AOL... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASTE https://web.archive.org/web/20100317095429/http://www.rollin...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
seems inherent - servers operate in rounds and each round carries legit traffic plus enough noise to allow traffic metadata to drown in nothingness and forward it to a whole server chain to avoid an adversary to control all the servers, so as you scale servers need more time to forward and mixin traffic
Could someone much smarter than me do some napkin math and figure out roughly what kind of tradeoff in security you make by limiting the noise? 20-40 seconds is fine if you are releasing NSA secret files and want the chance of metadata discovery to be But it's too much to use as a regular form of conversation between average parties who just want to set a precedent that all conversations by default should be un-monit…
With the current irc-ish UI the latency would clash with user expectations, but e-mail, message boards and quite a few other forms of communication regularly deal with much higher latencies. I suppose it depends on how you market it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could someone much smarter than me do some napkin math and figure out roughly what kind of tradeoff in security you make by limiting the noise? 20-40 seconds is fine if you are releasing NSA secret files and want the chance of metadata discovery to be But it's too much to use as a regular form of conversation between average parties who just want to set a precedent that all conversations by default should be un-monit…
> 20-40 seconds is […] too much to use as a regular form of conversation between average parties With the current irc-ish UI the latency would clash with user expectations, but e-mail, message boards and quite a few other forms of communication regularly deal with much higher latencies. I suppose it depends on how you market it.
Tracking IP address ... [30 seconds] ... Failed! Message delivered!Earlier quoted context omitted.
seems inherent - servers operate in rounds and each round carries legit traffic plus enough noise to allow traffic metadata to drown in nothingness and forward it to a whole server chain to avoid an adversary to control all the servers, so as you scale servers need more time to forward and mixin traffic
Could someone much smarter than me do some napkin math and figure out roughly what kind of tradeoff in security you make by limiting the noise? 20-40 seconds is fine if you are releasing NSA secret files and want the chance of metadata discovery to be But it's too much to use as a regular form of conversation between average parties who just want to set a precedent that all conversations by default should be un-monit…
now the problem is, the adversary modelled here is one that can drop a node out of the network and see if any other node message frequency drops.
that's why traffic, noise and latency are strictly correlated. if a conversation suddenly drop you have to make sure that the noise level doesn't drop, and vice versa.
when you start a conversation you need to tune down the noise, to maintain the frequency. thus the more noise you generate the more packet you can send when you need it, but the more the load on the servers.
it's not about hiding the message in the noise (that's tor model) it's about making messages statistically indistinguishable. for that there is no confidence interval, you need to send random noise out, randomly, at a fixed randomized frequency.
now I think they don't actually send a message every round, but do generate noise and messages interlocked so that the frequency remains constant. that frequency must be slower than rounds frequency and you cannot really tune it in the way you're suggesting. There might be probably other way to relax the confidence, but it might have impacts on other clients on the network, even those unrelated to your conversation.
also, under this round model, if a client drop after handshaking and before collecting the message the message for that handshake is lost (no retransmission and no chance to pick it up later)
Edit: Should have more explicitly asked -- can anyone who knows more about this chime in? Is it as novel as it seems? Does it look secure?
This is cool! Need to read the paper, and I'm not that knowledgeable anyway, but it seems to be offering something genuinely new. Edit: Should have more explicitly asked -- can anyone who knows more about this chime in? Is it as novel as it seems? Does it look secure?
"The cost of running a Vuvuzela server on AWS at current prices is about $10K/month, dominated by bandwidth usage."