Five-College Speaker Series on Information Assurance
| George Danezis |  |
A lot of traditional computer security has focused on protecting the content of communications by insuring confidentiality, integrity or availability. Yet the meta data associated with it - the sender, the receiver, the time and length of messages - also contains important information in itself and can also be used to quickly select targets for further surveillance. Such traffic analysis techniques have been used in the closed military communities for a while but their systematic study is an emerging field in the open security community. In this talk I will present two traffic analysis techniques that we have developed: the statistical disclosure attacks, and the traffic analysis of continuous time streams. They are both well understood and can act as a bound on how much protection a traffic analysis prevention system can provide. An example of how these can be applied to attack deployed systems will also be presented. Biography: George Danezis is a research assistant in the Security Group, of the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge, working on anonymous communications, peer-to-peer networks and censorship resistance. Previously he was a Ph.D. student of Ross Anderson, and studied for a B.A. in the Computer Laboratory and finished it in 2000. | |