This seems like an ideal application of information theoretic tricks for quantifying the amount of information in a signal. It reminds me of the search for the crack to the Enigma machine of the German military in World War II, somehow
> ..which reminds me: there may be merit to an architecture that uses a > relatively constant, quantized bandwidth to mask traffic. So for > instance, if you have 12kBps of peak outbound requests (as measured over > the last minute, say, you send a steady stream of 10kBps (mostly noise) > to your entry point so that no one can correlate your inbound requests > with traffic leaving the entry point or arriving at end point. This rate > can be pushed up in fixed increments that disguise actual throughput but > never fall below a minimum that disguises small transactions like IMAP > and XMPP. > > Providing cover for bursty traffic like web browsing in the reverse > direction is trickier, but is equally doable, provided you can budget > for the bandwidth and/or buffering at the entry points. > I guess then one partial solution to masking even low-latency Tor data is to simply wait until network speeds increase a couple orders of magnitude. There's likely a practical upper limit on how much information a human being can absorb in a given day, and as networking protocols are optimized and infrastructure supporting increased bandwidth is laid, the overhead of dummy packets (perhaps statistically generated based on current traffic in the network a la [Wang, 4]) is a vanishing cost. [ 4 ] Timing analysis in low-latency mix networks: attacks and defenses [Wang et al] http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/shmat_esorics06.pdf -- Rohan Dixit rohandixi...@gmail.com
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