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Abstract:
One of the core challenges facing the Internet today is the problem ofensuring privacy for its users. It is believed that mechanisms such asanonymity and pseudonymity are essential building blocks informulating solutions to address these challenges and considerableeffort has been devoted towards realizing these primitives in practice.The focus of this effort, however, has mostly been on hiding explicit identity information (such as source addresses) by employing a combination of anonymizing proxies, cryptographic techniques to distribute trust among them and traffic shaping techniques todefeat traffic analysis. We claim that such approaches ignore asignificant amount of identifying information about the source thatleaks from the contents of web traffic itself. In this paper, wedemonstrate the significance and value of such information by showinghow techniques from linguistics and stylometry can use thisinformation to compromise pseudonymity in several importantsettings. We discuss the severity of this problem and suggest possiblecountermeasures.
BibTeX
@inproceedings {271278,
author = {Josyula R. Rao and Pankaj Rohatgi},
title = {Can Pseudonymity Really Guarantee Privacy?},
booktitle = {9th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 00)},
year = {2000},
address = {Denver, CO},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/9th-usenix-security-symposium/can-pseudonymity-really-guarantee-privacy},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = aug
}
