Colloquium CANCELED (The DISSENT Approach to Anonymous, Interactive Communication on the Internet)

Abstract

Current anonymous-communication protocols based on onion

routing (OR) suffer three basic flaws: (1) OR’s security properties are largely only informally understood and not readily quantifiable; (2) OR inherently trades security for latency due to serialized relaying; and (3) anonymous disruptors can not only deny service but also defeat anonymity through adaptive denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. Existing dining-cryptographers (DC) approaches offer strong resistance to traffic analysis but are difficult to scale and just as vulnerable to disruption as OR. In this talk, we present ongoing work on DISSENT, the first practical anonymous-messaging protocol offering provable anonymity, strong protection against traffic analysis, and provable resistance to anonymous disruption.

Bio: Joan Feigenbaum is the Grace Murray Hopper Professor of Computer Science at Yale University. She received a BA in Mathematics from Harvard and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford. Between finishing her Ph.D. in 1986 and starting at Yale in 2000, she was with AT&T, where she participated very broadly in the company's Information-Sciences research agenda, e.g., by creating a research group in Algorithms and Distributed Data, of which she was the manager in 1998-99. Professor Feigenbaum's research interests include Internet algorithms, computational complexity, security and privacy, and digital copyright. While at Yale, she has been a principal in several high-profile activities, including the DARPA-funded DISSENT project, the NSF-funded PORTIA project, and the ONR-funded SPYCE project. Her current and recent professional activities include service as the Program Chair of the 2013 ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing and membership on the Editorial Board of the ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation and the Steering Committee of the NetEcon Workshop. Professor Feigenbaum is a Fellow of the ACM, a Fellow of the AAAS, a Member of the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering, and an invited speaker at the 1998 International Congress of Mathematicians.