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Ask HN: Generate random traffic for metadata obfuscation?
I remember some time ago a scare of meta data or something similar being leaked and specific peoples traffic being available (not security background so sorry if that doesn't even make sense), was just wondering if there were any scripts to randomly send requests to accumulate random meta data and obfuscate your real traffic?
- evils 10y agoSet up a Tor Exit node.
- feral 10y agoI've given this a good bit of thought; I'm sure its easy to generate plausible deniability, but actually masking relationships is not as simple as it sounds, as an adversary will easily filter out random noise. You would need chaff deliberately constructed to look a bit like non-random social network/communication data; that's kind of a research project, and its going to be hard to guarantee it is working in the face of unknown statistical attack.
- jstayton 10y agoTrackMeNot (http://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/ http://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/) uses this technique to protect against web search tracking. In general, privacy by obfuscation is an idea that privacy researchers have been considering. Other than TrackMeNot, however, I haven't seen many real-world applications.
- DavideNL 10y agoHah, awesome add-on, you can even add your own (language) websites/rss feeds.
- Natanael_L 10y agoTor, I2P
- brodo 10y agoScripts like these can be easily circumvented as browsing habits are not random. Using machine learning or statistical methods, you can filter out the randomness. People can be identified by the unique set of websites they use pretty reliably. (see https://svs.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/publications/2013/2013-04-10HBF_Behavior-based-tracking-with-dns-traffic.pdf https://svs.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/publications/2013/2013...) The only way to anonymize yourself using fake traffic is not to generate random traffic but to specifically engineer requests which bring you closer to the global average. How to do this is still an open research question.
- snerbles 10y agoWhy not generate browsing sessions from the mean? As a crude example, feed the browsing histories of many "typical" users into a Markov chain and do random walks during typical browsing hours.
- brodo 10y agoYes, that is a possible approach. The problem is to get browsing histories from typical users. If an anonymity tool needs to gather the user's browser history and share it with others, it kind of defeats the purpose of providing anonymity.
- snerbles 10y agoThe willfully ignorant "I have nothing to hide" crowd may be a viable source of volunteers.
- gruez 10y agoEven then, they're not going to install am extension just so you can track them.
- notduncansmith 10y agoYou could probably get the usage data from companies by offering analytics.
- notduncansmith 10y agoWhat if you were to train an algorithm for a given user's usage patterns on a website and then project those patterns onto other users? Use machine learning to generate realistic noise seeded with random keyword topics that would span multiple sites. It would appear to anyone watching as if you really did have a certain number of interests, that you don't actually hold. Then superimpose a bunch of fake usage profiles over your actual browsing.
- 10y ago
- JoeAltmaier 10y ago(xkcd) https://xkcd.com/576/ https://xkcd.com/576/
- bespoke_engnr 10y agoI don't know what's happening with this now, but I remember the Pond ( https://www.imperialviolet.org/2013/11/10/pond.html https://www.imperialviolet.org/2013/11/10/pond.html ) project working on something like this. I believe they were trying to do this with encrypted data as opposed to plaintext, but their work might still be interesting. IIRC a big part of it was batching transmissions and introducing a delay, sending 'dummy' data when there was no 'real' data, at regular intervals (to prevent timing/traffic correlation attacks). It kind of reminded me of the old Asynchronous Transfer Mode protocol, with its cells.
- Canada 10y agoHere's a couple of papers describing metadata resistant anonymity systems that may help you understand how "chaff" traffic can help obfuscate real traffic. It's not as simple as generating random noise because real traffic patterns can be identified with confirmation or intersection attacks. Aqua: http://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2013/papers/sigcomm/p303.pdf http://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2013/papers/sigcomm/p... Dissent: http://bford.info/pub/net/panopticon-cacm.pdf http://bford.info/pub/net/panopticon-cacm.pdf Of particular interest to your question are the threat models.
- kpdyer 10y agofteproxy [1] can superficially mask the protocol that you're using (e.g., makes Tor look like HTTP) using regular expressions. marionette [2] enables control over what protocol it looks like you're using and duration of connections generated, amount of data sent per connection, etc. [1] https://fteproxy.org/ https://fteproxy.org/ [2] https://github.com/marionette-tg/marionette https://github.com/marionette-tg/marionette