PriFi: A Low-Latency Local-Area Anonymous Communication Network

Popular anonymity protocols such as Tor [15] provide low communication latency but are vulnerable to trafficanalysis attacks that can de-anonymize users. Traffic-analysis resistant protocols typically do not achieve low-latency communication (e.g., Dissent [58], Riffle [30]), or are restricted to a specific type of traffic (e.g., Herd [34], Aqua [33]). In this paper, we present PriFi, the first practical protocol for anonymous communication in local-area networks that is provably secure against traffic-analysis attacks, has a low communication latency, and is traffic agnostic. PriFi is based on Dining Cryptographer’s networks [6], and uses a 3-layer architecture which removes the usual anonymization bottleneck seen in mix networks: packets sent by the clients follow their usual path, without any additional hop that would add latency. As a second contribution, we propose a novel technique for protecting against equivocation attacks, in which a malicious relay de-anonymizes clients by sending them different information. In PriFi’ architecture, this is achieved without adding extra latency; in particular, clients do not need to gossip or run consensus among themselves. Finally, we describe a technique for detecting disruption (jamming) attacks by malicious clients and a blaming mechanism to enforce accountability against such attacks. We have fully implemented PriFi and evaluated its performance with well-known datasets. Our analysis is twofold: first, we show that our architecture tolerates well client churn; second, we show that the system can be used in practice with minimal latency overhead (e.g., 70ms for 50 clients), and is compatible with delay-sensitive application such as VoIP.