Fwd: Talk invitation: Analyzing and Enhancing Routing Protocols for Friend-to-Friend Overlays

In case anyone else is at PETS and interested.
I'm going to pick up up Marios and Richard up after the coffee break 

We would like to invite you to the following presentation (test talk):
Speaker: Stefanie Roos, TU Dresden
Title: Analyzing and Enhancing Routing Protocols for Friend-to-Friend
Overlays
Date: 20.07.2016 Time: 11:30 Location: Piloty, room A313

Abstract:
The threat of surveillance by governmental and industrial parties is
more eminent than ever.
As communication moves  into the digital domain, the advances in
automatic assessment and interpretation of enormous amounts of data
enable tracking of millions of people, recording and monitoring their
private life with an unprecedented accurateness.
The knowledge of such an all-encompassing loss of privacy affects the
behavior of individuals, inducing various degrees of (self-)censorship
and anxiety. Furthermore, the monopoly of a few large-scale
organizations on digital communication enables global censorship and
manipulation of public opinion. Thus, the current situation undermines
the freedom of speech to a detrimental degree and threatens the
foundations of modern society.

Anonymous and censorship-resistant communication systems are hence of
utmost importance to circumvent constant surveillance. However, existing
systems are highly vulnerable to infiltration and sabotage. In
particular, Sybil attacks, i.e., powerful parties inserting a large
number of fake identities into the system, enable malicious parties to
observe and possibly manipulate a large fraction of the communication
within the system. Friend-to-friend (F2F) overlays, which restrict
direct communication to parties sharing a real-world trust relationship,
are a promising countermeasure to Sybil attacks, since the requirement
of establishing real-world trust increases the cost of infiltration
drastically.
Yet, existing F2F overlays suffer from a low performance, are vulnerable
to denial-of-service attacks, or fail to provide anonymity.

Our first contribution in this thesis is concerned with an in-depth
analysis of the concepts underlying the design of state-of-the-art F2F
overlays. In the course of this analysis, we first extend the existing
evaluation methods considerably, hence providing tools for both our and
future research in the area of F2F overlays and distributed systems in
general.
Based on the novel methodology, we prove that existing approaches are
inherently unable to offer acceptable delays without either requiring
exhaustive maintenance costs  or enabling denial-of-service attacks and
de-anonymization.

Consequentially, our second contribution lies in the design and
evaluation of a novel concept for F2F overlays based on insights of the
prior in-depth analysis. Our previous analysis has revealed that greedy
embeddings allow highly efficient communication in arbitrary
connectivity-restricted overlays by addressing participants through
coordinates and adapting these coordinates to the overlay structure.
However, greedy embeddings in their original form reveal the identity of
the communicating parties and fail to provide the necessary resilience
in the presence of dynamic and possibly malicious users.
Therefore, we present a privacy-preserving communication protocol for
greedy embeddings based on anonymous return addresses rather than
identifying node coordinates. Furthermore, we enhance the
communication's robustness and attack-resistance by using multiple
parallel embeddings and alternative  algorithms for message delivery.
We show that our approach achieves a low communication complexity. By
replacing the coordinates with anonymous addresses, we furthermore
provably achieve anonymity in the form of plausible deniability against
an internal local adversary.
Complementary, our simulation study on real-world data indicates that
our approach is highly efficient and effectively mitigates the impact of
failures as well as powerful denial-of-service attacks.
Our fundamental results open new possibilities for anonymous and
censorship-resistant applications.

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