

Kwon, an electrical engineering and computer science graduate, talked about problems like honeypotting in which users are lured into the traps placed inside anonymity networks and the needs of users of websites like Twitter who share their thoughts with other people while hiding behind a digital camouflage. Albert Kwon, who is the prime author of the research paper, says that “the initial use case that we thought of was to do anonymous file-sharing, where the receiving end and sending end don’t know each other”. The new anonymity network will consume less bandwidth than other networks of similar type while transferring data. MIT News reports that the newly created anonymity network will be uncovered by the researchers of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium later this month. The news sounds good to the ears after hearing stories about vulnerabilities present in Tor. The point of giving such example is that the researchers at MIT have come up with a new anonymity network which is said to be more secure and safer than the existing ones, namely Tor.


I have no intention to hurt those guys, by the way. MIT is a place where a stone thrown up in the air will definitely land on an extraordinary mind. The researchers will showcase it at a tech symposium later this month. It’s a mix network which implements methods like verifiable shuffle and Authentication Encryption.

The system isn't yet available for public use, but the researchers will present a paper describing their work at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium in Germany next week.Short Bytes: Researchers at MIT and EPFL have come up with a new anonymity network that is said to be more secure than Tor. Riffle was developed by researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. In experiments, it required only one-tenth as much time as similarly secure experimental systems to transfer a large file between anonymous users. Meanwhile, Riffle also uses bandwidth much more efficiently than competing systems, its creators say. The overall result is that Riffle remains cryptographically secure as long as one server in the mixnet remains uncompromised, according to MIT. Verifiable shuffle keeps things secure while each user and each mixnet server agree upon a cryptographic key authentication encryption, which is much more efficient, then takes over for the remainder of the communication session. Essentially, it takes a two-pronged approach to validating the authenticity of messages using techniques called verifiable shuffle and authentication encryption. That's where Riffle's third protective measure comes in. Then it could passively track the one message that doesn’t follow its own prespecified route. If one has commandeered a mixnet router and wants to determine the destination of a particular message, for instance, it could simply replace all the other messages it receives with its own, bound for a single destination. But active adversaries, which can infiltrate servers with their own code, are another matter. A mixnet used with onion encryption is protected against passive adversaries, which can only observe network traffic.
