Anonymous and Censorship-Resistant Communication (B05)

• Subject Area: Security and Dependability, Operating-, Communication- and Distributed Systems
• Term: from 2016 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 272573906

Anonymous communication networks suffer from a fundamental weakness: adversaries can determine which traffic enters the network and censor ¿undesired¿ communication, forcing users to resort to non-anonymous communication. Can we reliably enable censored users to bootstrap anonymous communication? How do we evade address-based and content-based filters? We will devise a decentralized trust metric and privacy-preserving trust networks, in combination with honeypots to identify censoring adversaries. We will evaluate and harness the potential of covert communication methods for hiding communication content, as well as design practical censorship-resistance plugins for Tor and I2P.

• DFG Programme: Collaborative Research Centres
• Subproject of: SFB 1223: Methods and Tools for Understanding and Controlling Privacy
• Applicant Institution: Universität des Saarlandes
• Project Heads: Professor Matteo Maffei, Ph.D., until 3/2017; Professor Dr. Christian Rossow