ohai metalab, (not an official security by candlelight, just feeling a little bit like intelligent distraction) i'll be in the lab around 19:00 i would like to get in contact with some people who can spare time on implementing a protocol i stumbled upon a few years ago: Drac: An Architecture for Anonymous Low-Volume Communications (i think i already talked a few heads off in the recent months about this, but i'm convinced it's worth a shot) DRAC was published on several sites around 2009/2010 and suggests an architecture for anonymous communication with some new and promising features: - based on peer to peer communication - capable of low volume communication like short and instant messages and probably low quality voice (e.g. using the free speex codec @2,15kbit/s) - communications between friends are unobservable - communications with further contacts are anonymous - it provides an anonymous presence service (an adversary taking over the presence server can't find out the identities of logged-in users) Citation from the paper about proving the claims: "Three aspects of the system are studied though simulations: the anonymity provided against the presence system, and the anonymity and unobservability of communications towards a global passive adversary." Good levels of anonymity and unobservability can be reached even for small networks with some hundred of a few thousand nodes (good level means same success rate as random guesses). The architecture uses hashes and epochs (roughly having a similar effect like salted hashes) and layered encryption similar to the onion encryption. some papers can be found here: http://research.google.com/pubs/archive/36335.pdf http://homes.esat.kuleuven.be/~cdiaz/talks/Drac-Grenoble.pdf http://homes.esat.kuleuven.be/~ctroncos/index_archivos/talks/Troncoso-Drac-S... Some ideas are incorporated from APRES (Ben Laurie): http://www.apache-ssl.org/apres.pdf Authors are: George Danezis (Microsoft Research) http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/gdane/ Claudia Diaz (K.U.Leuven ESAT/COSIC) http://homes.esat.kuleuven.be/~cdiaz/ Carmela Troncoso (KU Leuven/COSIC) http://homes.esat.kuleuven.be/~ctroncos/ Ben Laurie (The bunker, apache-ssl.org, links.org) Greets, MiKa