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Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons

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University of Massachusetts Amherst

Anonymity

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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Enabling Accurate Analysis Of Private Network Data, Michael Hay Sep 2010

Enabling Accurate Analysis Of Private Network Data, Michael Hay

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation addresses the challenge of enabling accurate analysis of network data while ensuring the protection of network participants' privacy. This is an important problem: massive amounts of data are being collected (facebook activity, email correspondence, cell phone records), there is huge interest in analyzing the data, but the data is not being shared due to concerns about privacy. Despite much research in privacy-preserving data analysis, existing technologies fail to provide a solution because they were designed for tables, not networks, and cannot be easily adapted to handle the complexities of network data. We develop several technologies that advance us …


The Predecessor Attack: An Analysis Of A Threat To Anonymous Communications Systems, Matthew K. Wright, Micah Adler, Brian Neil Levine, Clay Sheilds Jan 2002

The Predecessor Attack: An Analysis Of A Threat To Anonymous Communications Systems, Matthew K. Wright, Micah Adler, Brian Neil Levine, Clay Sheilds

Computer Science Department Faculty Publication Series

There have been a number of protocols proposed for anonymous network communication. In this paper we investigate attacks by corrupt group members that degrade the anonymity of each protocol over time. We prove that when a particular initiator continues communication with a particular responder across path reformations, existing protocols are subject to the attack. We use this result to place an upper bound on how long existing protocols, including Crowds, Onion Routing, Hordes, Web Mixes, and DC-Net, can maintain anonymity in the face of the attacks described. This provides a basis for comparing these protocols against each other. Our results …