begin forwarded text Date: Sat, 3 Aug 2002 05:26:12 +0100 From: Adam Back To: Cypherpunks Cc: Adam Back Old-Subject: info-theoretic model of anonymity User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.2i Subject: info-theoretic model of anonymity Sender: owner-cypherpunks@lne.comJust read this paper published in PET02 "Towards an Information Theoretic Metric for Anonymity" [1]: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~gd216/set.pdf or http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~gd216/set.psit uses a Shannon like entropy model for the anonymity provided by a system uses this model to analyse the effect of different parameters one can tune with mixmaster (POOLSIZE, RATE, in mixmaster.conf).The "anonymity entropy" measurement can be interpreted as how many bits of information the attacker needs to identify a user and is computed from probabilities.Would be interesting to try estimate the entropy provided by the current mixmaster network. A number of nodes publish their parameter choices, and traffic volume over time (in hourly increments).Adam -- http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/[1]@inproceedings{Serjantov:02:info-theoretic-anon, author = "Andrei Serjantov and George Danezis", title = "Towards an Information Theoretic Metric for Anonymity", booktitle = "Proceedings of the Workshop on Privacy Enhancing Technologies", year = "2002", note = "Also available as \url{http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~aas23/papers_aas/set.ps}" }--- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork