16 Nov
1992
16 Nov
'92
6:15 p.m.
My spin on the Dining Cryptographers Protocol is, it's nifty and theoretically strong, but in practice mixes are better for almost all uses. If you have N people in a DC-net, you must exchange N bits of traffic per bit of anonymous message transmitted. If you use mixes and send each message on M hops, you exchange M bits of traffic per bit of anonymous message transmitted. N is typically 100-10000, and M is typically 2-10. Mixes are more efficient. One advantage of DC-nets is that they're instant; with mixes there must be some delays in order to accumulate enough cover messages to defeat traffic analysis. -- Marc Ringuette (mnr@cs.cmu.edu)