Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Vuvuzela – Private messaging system that hides metadata

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 32 posts

Re: Vuvuzela – Private messaging system that hides metadata

#21

Post by jlgaddis »

fulafel wrote: post #19

Here's a summary and commentary of the paper from Adrian Colyer's 'important/interesting CS papers' review blog: http://blog.acolyer.org/2015/10/23/vuvuzela-scalable-private... "The cost of running a Vuvuzela server on AWS at current prices is about $10K/month, dominated by bandwidth usage."

Or probably about $50 for a VPS...

The amount of bandwidth used per month isn't mentioned but when the Snapchat database was leaked I hosted it on a server of mine and snapchatdb.info was pointed at it. Bandwidth over the first three days was just over 27 TB and didn't cost a dime extra (I work for an ISP and my servers are housed in our cages in datacenters but I pay very little for them).

What's 27 TB cost on AWS?

Re: Vuvuzela – Private messaging system that hides metadata

#24

Post by nevi-me »

chirau wrote: post #22

Out of curiosity, why did you call it Vuvuzela? I'm from Southern Africa btw

Perhaps because it generates a lot of noise (latency, active users) in the process, like the vuvuzela does :)

I was hoping to find the rationale in the name on the link, but didn't see anything.

Re: Vuvuzela – Private messaging system that hides metadata

#27

Post by loginusername »

willvarfar wrote: post #8

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...

Author of WinAmp.

Re: Vuvuzela – Private messaging system that hides metadata

#28

Post by OR13 »

lez wrote: post #20

for the record: bitmessage also has this kind of metadata & data privacy

BitMessage has greater latency (~2 Mins?) but is fully P2P, given the cost estimates for a server upthread, I wonder if bandwidth concerns are the reasons for a client server architecture over P2P...

My understanding is that BitMessage achieves its non-content privacy guarantees by sending each message to all clients, and then the latency is the result of the Proof of Work and some other concepts borrowed from BitCoin.

I'd love to hear more about it if you have time.

In particular, I'm interested in the P2P vs Client-Server trade off, is Vuvuzela workable in a fully P2P network, say over WebRTC?

Re: Vuvuzela – Private messaging system that hides metadata

#29

Post by sschueller »

jlgaddis wrote: post #21
fulafel wrote: post #19

Here's a summary and commentary of the paper from Adrian Colyer's 'important/interesting CS papers' review blog: http://blog.acolyer.org/2015/10/23/vuvuzela-scalable-private... "The cost of running a Vuvuzela server on AWS at current prices is about $10K/month, dominated by bandwidth usage."

Or probably about $50 for a VPS... The amount of bandwidth used per month isn't mentioned but when the Snapchat database was leaked I hosted it on a server of mine and snapchatdb.info was pointed at it. Bandwidth over the first three days was just over 27 TB and didn't cost a dime extra (I work for an ISP and my servers are housed in our cages in datacenters but I pay very little for them). What's 27 TB cost on AWS?

  First 1 GB / month	$0.00 per GB
  Up to 10 TB / month	$0.09 per GB
  Next 40 TB / month	$0.085 per GB
So around USD 2,345.-

Re: Vuvuzela – Private messaging system that hides metadata

#30

Post by lazard »

mintplant wrote: post #5

> In practice, the message latency would be around 20s to 40s, depending on security parameters and the number of users connected to the system. Haven't had time to read the paper yet - is this an inherent property of the system, or a number that could be reduced by future work?

Author here:

The latency can be reduced by future work. For example, Section 9 in the paper mentions an idea for reducing the amount of noise (and thus reducing latency) by treating honest users as noise.

Vuvuzela can also be configured with a smaller "privacy budget" to reduce latency.

Post reply on HN