On the Privacy and Performance of Mobile Anonymous Microblogging
Marius Senftleben, Ana Barroso, Mihai Bucicoiu, Matthias Hollick, Stefan Katzenbeisser, Erik Tews · IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security · 2016
Microblogging is a popular form of online social networking activity. It allows users to send messages in a one-to-many publish-subscribe manner. Most current service providers are centralized and deploy a client-server model with unencrypted message content. As a consequence, all user behavior can, by default, be monitored, and censoring based on message content can easily be enforced on the server side. A distributed, peer-to-peer microblogging system consisting of mobile smartphone-equipped users that exchange group encrypted messages in an anonymous and censorship-resistant manner can alleviate privacy and censorship issues. We experimentally evaluate message spread of such systems with simulations that run on a range of synthetic and real-world mobility inputs, thus extending the previous work. We show that such systems are feasible for a range of mobility and network settings, both under normal and under adversarial conditions, e.g., under the presence of nodes which jam the network or send spam.