[OTR-dev] Project to Conceal communication profiles from the service provider

[Hugo Herter]

Hi all,

I am a master student in Artificial Intelligence, doing a thesis
on privacy technologies, more precisely on traffic analysis resistance in the
context of instant messaging.

We am interested in developing a plug-in for IM clients to conceal the users
communication profiles (how often users communicate and with whom) from the
service provider.

To achieve this, our strategy would be to have the IM client generate dummy
messages and mix them with the real traffic, thus introducing noise in the
communication profile observed by the service provider.
Messages would be encrypted, as a first step to prevent the service from
filtering out the dummy traffic.  In a second step, real messages might also
be made less distinguishable from dummy messages by slightly delaying them, in
an attempt to conceal their timing patterns.

Moreover, dummy messages could be sent to friends only or to both friends and
random users. The former would conceal the actual "weights" in the
communication profile while revealing the list of contacts; the latter would
potentially allow to conceal the whole profile itself, both its weights and
the list of friends.

I am aware that this approach is not perfect and generates an excess in
bandwidth, but the extra privacy and the compatibility with existing IM
platforms might justify it.

I was wondering:

Would anybody be interested in using such system ?
Do you know of a tool doing something similar already ?
Do you have any comments or ideas?

Any comments/feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Best regards,

Hugo Herter
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