Footprint scheduling for dining-cryptographer networks

Abstract

In many communication scenarios it is not sufficient to protect only the content of the communication, it is necessary to also protect the identity of communicating parties. Various protocols and technologies have been proposed to offer such protection, for example, anonymous proxies, mix-networks, or onion routing. The protocol that offers the strongest anonymity guarantees, namely unconditional sender and recipient untraceability, is the Dining Cryptographer (DC) protocol proposed by Chaum in 1988. Unfortunately the strong anonymity guarantees come at the price of limited performance and scalability and multiple issues that make deployment complicated in practice. In this paper we address one of those issues, namely slot reservation. We propose footprint scheduling as a new technique for participants to negotiate communication slots without losing anonymity and at the same time hiding the number of actively sending users. Footprint scheduling is at the same time simple, efficient and yields excellent results, in particular in very dynamic networks with a frequently changing set of participants and frequently changing activity rate.