Communications of the ACM
Guaranteeing Online Anonymity
A new program from the Research Center for IT Security can provide an accurate assessment of the level of online anonymity an individual user achieves.
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Researchers at the Research Center for IT Security (CISPA) have developed a program that can provide an accurate assessment of the level of online anonymity an individual user achieves, even while basing the estimate on the fluctuations of the Tor network, which is one of the most popular tools for online anonymization services.
Since the start of 2015, more than 2 million users have used Tor to anonymize their Internet connection data. However, Tor is not perfect because unanticipated attacks at the network level can endanger anonymity, and the degree of anonymity the network achieves is highly variable, according to CISPA researcher Esfandiar Mohammadi.
In an attempt to solve this issue, Mohammadi helped develop a program that can provide an accurate assessment of the level of anonymity an individual user achieves. The technique, called MATor, is based on a mathematical model that the researchers extended to include different categories of possible attacks. The program performs its calculations using data that is aggregated once an hour and published on the network immediately.
In addition, MATor takes the specifics of the respective Internet connection into account, as well as the individual configurations of the Tor software, says Saarland University researcher Sebastian Meiser.
From Homeland Security News Wire
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