Research on the Anti-attack Design Principles of Low-Latency Anonymous Communication

Low-latency anonymous communication is widely used in privacy protection. However, the attacks against anonymous communication are critical threats to the privacy protection. Many efforts have been conducted to provide robustness by establishing anti-attack principles. In this paper we present a brief survey on attack methods and summarize up four underlying anti-attack principles. In order to better understand the background of anonymous communication, we demonstrate the processes of attack and introduce some typical attack methods, ranging from active attacks to passive attacks. Based on our analysis, we propose four underlying principles, including information leaking prevention, key node protection, data stream signatures elimination and connection characteristics elimination, to improve the anti-attack ability of low-latency anonymous communication. To validate these principles, we design a protocol named Hermit-crab, which follows the four anti-attack principles. The analysis shows the protocol can effectively defend common attacks in low-latency anonymous communication.