Minimising anonymity loss in anonymity networks under DoS attacks

Abstract

Anonymity is a security property of paramount importance as it helps to protect users' privacy by ensuring that their identity remains unknown. Anonymity protocols generally suffer from denial of service (DoS) attack, as repeated message retransmission affords more opportunities for attackers to analyse traffic and lower the protocols' privacy. In this paper, we analyse how users can minimise their anonymity loss under DoS attacks by choosing to remove or keep 'failed' nodes from router lists. We also investigate the strategy effectiveness in those cases where users cannot decide whether the 'failed' node are the targets of DoS attacks. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.