[TECH] defeating traffic analysis

henry strickland strick at osc.versant.com
Wed Oct 20 11:17:45 PDT 1993


# From: cme at ellisun.sw.stratus.com (Carl Ellison)
# 
# So:  have everyone send and receive exactly the same size message to/from the
# same sites at the same time every day.

That seems so unfortunate that the "average utilizaton" and the
"peak throughput" [I use quotes because I may have the wrong 
technical buzzwords, but you know what I mean] have to be
one and the same.

I've been trying to think of ways around that.  Am I wasting my time?

I've thought of trying to find probabilistic ways of letting you
vary how much your read/write to the net each day, maintaining
some constant statisics (average amount you read/write, standard
deviation, ...), that allows you one day to read a lot more than
the average, when you need to, without giving away that it was
useful information instead of padding. 

But I'm afraid it still gives away partial bits of information --
it is still likely that the hungriest readers and the most verbose
writers match up.

This becomes more on my mind, as I work on DCNet protocols.

References?  Advice?                    strick







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