Anonymous communications is a 25 year old field that has received a great deal of attention lately. This is due to the ubiquitous deployment of information networks, and the privacy concerns associated with their use. In this talk I shall explain the foundations of anonymous communications systems, their use cases and the threat models against which they attempt to protects users. Real world deployed systems, such as Tor, Mixminion, JAP and Anonymizer, will be used throughout to illustrate the presented theory -- as well as to study the extent to which these concrete implementations fulfill the security promises of the theoretical constructions. Finally I will present an outline of traffic analysis techniques, that attempt to trace communication patterns through anonymous communication systems, and outline their strengths and limitations.
George Danezis is post-doctoral visiting fellow at the Cosic group, K.U.Leuven, in Flanders, Belgium. He has been researching anonymous communications, privacy enhancing technologies, and traffic analysis for the last 6 years, at K.U.Leuven and the University of Cambridge, where he completed his doctoral dissertation.
His theoretical contributions to the PET field include the established information theoretic metric for anonymity and the study of statistical attacks against mix systems. On the practical side he is one of the lead designers of Mixminion, the next generation remailer, and has worked on the traffic analysis of deployed protocols such as SSL and Tor. He was the co-chair of the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Workshop in 2005 and 2006, he serves on the PET workshop board and has participated in multiple conference and workshop program committees in the privacy and security field.
Homepage: http://homes.esat.kuleuven.be/~gdanezis/
