• DOI:10.1109/WIFS.2014.7084306
• Corpus ID: 12929696

Understanding the effects of real-world behavior in statistical disclosure attacks

@article{Oya2014UnderstandingTE,
  title={Understanding the effects of real-world behavior in statistical disclosure attacks},
  author={Simon Oya and Carmela Troncoso and Fernando P{\'e}rez-Gonz{\'a}lez},
  journal={2014 IEEE International Workshop on Information Forensics and Security (WIFS)},
  year={2014},
  pages={72-77}
}

• Simon Oya, C. Troncoso, F. Pérez-González
• Published 1 December 2014
• Computer Science
• 2014 IEEE International Workshop on Information Forensics and Security (WIFS)

High-latency anonymous communication systems prevent passive eavesdroppers from inferring communicating partners with certainty. However, disclosure attacks allow an adversary to recover users' behavioral profiles when communications are persistent. Understanding how the system parameters affect the privacy of the users against such attacks is crucial. Earlier work in the area analyzes the performance of disclosure attacks in controlled scenarios, where a certain model about the users' behavior is assumed. In this paper, we analyze the profiling accuracy of one of the most efficient disclosure attack, the least squares disclosure attack, in realistic scenarios. We generate real traffic observations from datasets of different nature and find that the models considered in previous work do not fit this realistic behavior. We relax previous hypotheses on the behavior of the users and extend previous performance analyses, validating our results with real data and providing new insights into the parameters that affect the protection of the users in the real world.