Communications of the ACM
Secure P2p Scheme Leverages Social Networks
Microsoft and Catholic University of Leuven researchers are proposing Drac, a method to secure anonymous instant messaging (IM) and voice-over-IP (VoIP) communication using peer-to-peer technology. Drac makes IM and VoIP traffic anonymous and unobservable by exposing the social connections of the users who make up the nodes of the peer-to-peer network. "Drac gives away the identity of a user's friends to guarantee the unobservability of actual calls, while still providing anonymity when talking to trusted third parties," the researchers say.
Although anonymous online communications may conceal the content of conversations, information about the network addressing the timing of messages and the volume of traffic often reveal as much as the hidden correspondence, according to the researchers. Drac is designed to preserve anonymity while also stopping traffic analysis by using a peer-to-peer relay architecture that routes data through social networking connections.
From Information Week
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