AnonPoP: the Anonymous Post-Office Protocol
- 14:00 25th June 2014 ( Trinity Term 2014 )Tony Hoare Room, Robert Hooke Building
Anonymous Post-office Protocol (AnonPoP) is a messaging protocol ensuring strong anonymity to senders and recipients, even against powerful adversaries. AnonPoP is practical, scalable and efficient, with reasonable overhead in latency and communication. Furthermore, it is appropriate even for use in mobile devices, with modest, reasonable energy consumption (validated experimentally), and with good security even against MitM adversaries and even for disconnection-intersection attacks. To provide anonymity and unobservability even against MitM attackers, AnonPoP uses Post-Office Servers, which keep anonymous mailboxes, and Mixes, between the Post-office and senders/recipients. The Post-Office is aware of the total amount of traffic in the system, but not of traffic patterns of individual senders and recipients. AnonPoP uses efficient cryptographic mechanisms, to ensure anonymity even against a malicious post office, who can also be MitM on all network traffic (and control some mixes). AnonPop supports many diverse scenarios and applications, with an expressive mailbox authorization policy, including defenses against spam and Denial-of-Service.
This is joint work with Nethanel Gelernter.
Speaker bio
Prof. Amir Herzberg is a tenured associate professor in the department of computer science, Bar Ilan university. He received B.Sc. (1982, Computer Engineering), M.Sc. (1987, Electrical Engineering) and D.Sc. (1991, Computer Science), all from the Technion, Israel. Prof. Herzberg worked for many years in the industry, mostly in computer security, and most notably in IBM research, where he established and managed the network security and cryptography group at the IBM T. J. Watson research center (NY) over five years, and then established the `Tel-Aviv Annex’ of the IBM Haifa research lab, where he led research on secure e-commerce. He is author of 21 issued patents, 39 articles in refereed periodicals, 5 book chapters, and 70 papers in refereed conferences.Prof. Herzberg’s research interests include: Network security, esp. Internet protocols: TCP/IP, DNS, routing, and Denial-of-Service; Privacy, anonymity and covert communication; Provable yet applied cryptography; Usable security and social-engineering attacks; Financial cryptography and Trust management
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