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

[Andrew Vineyard]

It is an interesting idea, but the idea of sending dummy messages to
random users would mean spamming unintended recipients with
unintelligible text. While it would help hide you messages better, it
would backlash with complains from the random recipients. To handle
that, the messages would have to be sent only to users who are using the
same software and OTR plugins, and are all using the same IM server, and
letting the server itself send the bulk of the dummy messages to
everyone. The software would have to know that it's getting dummy
messages so it could also ignore them completely.

Another thing to note is that sending dummy messages would increase the
amount of bandwidth you're using for the month, in some cases might be
drastic if not configured right. You wouldn't want to find yourself with
a massive service bill for using 500 GBs of bandwidth in just a week. I
know that's a major exaggeration, but it helps give the idea.

On 12/27/2013 1:25 PM, Hugo Herter wrote:
> 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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