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Hiding the metadata in communication systems
Dan Boneh.YouTube,00:55:34,published onJan 24, 2017,University of Washington Computer Science & Engineering,https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1EyaRhIMD8.Type:Video
Date Reviewed: Jan 3 2018

Security and privacy are two critical concerns in today’s mobile world, especially with regard to the Internet, social networking, and communications systems such as chat systems and messaging. Great strides have been made in the area of really strong cryptography, starting with the early development of the data encryption standard (DES) and 3DES in 1977, which is a multiple implementation of DES used to increase its strength and thwart hacking. More recently, a much stronger cryptographic method, known as the advanced encryption standard (AES), was developed; it is a subset of the Rijndael cipher, developed by two Belgian cryptographers, Vincent Rijmen and Joan Daemen, who submitted their proposal for AES to the US National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) in 1998. Anyone interested in secure communications in a mobile society should be concerned not only with keeping their messages secure, but also with preserving their anonymity.

Dan Boneh, a professor of applied computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford University, in his video “Hiding the Metadata in Communication Systems,” explores the recent progress being made in research into the area of protecting one’s anonymity in chat systems. While it is fairly easy today to conceal the contents of a message using AES encryption, by and large, the metadata associated with these messages has remained in clear text--that is, the activity records have not been encrypted. Boneh discusses three separate means of hiding the owner (metadata) of these communications: Tor, Mix-Nets, and Riposte. While Tor (the onion router) offers anonymity, it lacks the ability to thwart dedicated traffic analysis. Mix-Nets works with multiple servers that act as proxies, but has as its vulnerability the implementation of expensive zero-knowledge to protect against active attacks, especially if one of the servers is colluding with another. Riposte is an anonymous messaging system that appears to offer the best protection in preserving user anonymity and can handle millions of users quite easily. It is this concept of Riposte (providing anonymity without mixing) that Boneh targets as his primary focus (at about 24:30 into the video) for further development and implementation in Internet communications.

The YouTube video lecture is one of high-definition (HD) video/audio quality, is free to view, and is publicly shared. The presenter’s approach to this talk, given to a group of research students at the University of Washington (UW) Computer Science and Engineering Department, is both informative and engaging and uses a problem-based learning (PBL) approach. I was neither discouraged nor overwhelmed by the mathematics or subject matter contained in this video.

In conclusion, Boneh’s approach to building scalable systems with a large number of users to hide metadata in communications using Go is conducive to encouraging anyone interested in furthering their own research in cryptography. He cautions that building such systems, however, would require finding solutions that prevent trolling and spamming. I thoroughly enjoyed his lecture and would highly recommend it to both laypeople and budding researchers in the field of metadata encryption.

Reviewer:  Daniel Calloway Review #: CR145746 (1803-0156)
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