The drunk motorcyclist protocol for anonymous communication
Adam L. Young, Moti M. Yung · 2014
The buses protocol is designed to provide provably anonymous communication on a connected graph. Figuratively speaking, a bus is a single unit of transport containing multiple seats. Each seat carries a ciphertext from a sender to a receiver. The buses approach aims to conceal traffic patterns by having buses constantly travel along fixed routes and is a step forward in concealing traffic compared to other anonymous communication protocols. Therefore, in this day in which Internet privacy is crucial it deserves further investigation. Here, we cryptanalyze the reduced-seat Buses protocol and we also present distinguishing attacks against the related Taxis protocol as well as P5. These attacks highlight the need to employ cryptosystems with key-privacy in such protocols. We then show that anonymity is not formally proven in the buses protocols. These findings motivate the need for a new provably secure connectionless anonymous messaging protocol. We present what we call the drunk motorcyclist (DM) protocol for anonymous messaging that overcomes these issues. We define the DM protocol, show a construction for it, and then prove that anonymity and confidentiality hold under Decision Diffie-Hellman (DDH) against global active adversaries. Our protocol demonstrates the new principle of flooding a complete graph or an expander graph with randomly walking ciphertexts that travel until their time-to-live values expire. This principle also exhibits fault-tolerance properties.