DEF CON 16 - Magnus Brading: Generic, Decentralized, Unstoppable Anonymity: The Phantom Protocol
Channel: DEFCONConference
Date: 26/11/2013

DEF CON 16 - Magnus Brading: Generic, Decentralized, Unstoppable Anonymity: The Phantom Protocol
Recent years, and especially this past year, have seen a notable upswing in developments toward anti online privacy around the world, primarily in the form of draconian surveillance and censorship laws (both passed and attempted) and ISPs being pressured into individually acting as both police and informants for commercial interests. Once such first steps are taken, it's of course also of huge concern how these newly created possibilities could be used outside of their originally stated bounds, and what the future of such developments may be.

There are no signs of this trend being broken anytime soon, and combined with the ever growing online migration of everything in general, and privacy sensitive activities in particular (like e.g. voting and all kinds of discussions and other personal groupings), this will in turn unavoidably lead to a huge demand for online anonymization tools and similar privacy means.

If not designed carefully though, such anonymization tools will yet again be easy targets for additional draconian legislation and directed (il)legal pressure from big commercial interests. Thus, a good, robust and theoretically secure design for an anonymization protocol and infrastructure is needed, which is exactly what is set out to be done with this project.

What is presented in this talk is the design of a protocol and complete system for anonymization, intended as a candidate for a free, open, community owned, de facto anonymization standard, vastly improving on existing solutions such as TOR, and having the following important main properties and design goals:

1. Completely decentralized.
- No critical or weak points to attack or put (il)legal pressure on.

2. Maximum resistance against all kinds of DoS attacks.
- Direct technical destructive attacks will practically be the only possible way to even attempt to stop it.

3. Theoretically secure anonymization.
- Probabilistic methods (contrary to deterministic methods) must be used in a completely decentralized design like this, where no other peer can be trusted, so focus is put on optimizing these methods.

4. Theoretically secure end-to-end transport encryption.
- This is simple in itself, but still important in the context of anonymization.

5. Completely (virtually) isolated from the "normal" Internet.
- No one should have to worry about crimes being perpetrated from their own IP address.

6. Maximum protection against identification of protocol usage through traffic analysis.
- You never know what the next draconian law might be.

7. Capable of handling larger data volumes, with acceptable throughput.
- Most existing anonymization solutions are practically unusable for (or even prohibit) larger data volumes.

8. Generic and well-abstracted design, compatible with all new and existing network enabled software.
- Software application developer participation should not be needed, it should be easy to apply the anonymization to both new and already existing products like e.g. web browsers and file transfer software.

The Phantom protocol has been designed to meet all these requirements, and will be presented in this talk.

Magnus Brading is a security researcher at (and co-founder of) Swedish IT security specialist firm Fortego Security.

His life-long passion for reversing, understanding and ultimately controlling any and all aspects and processes around him has resulted in, among other things, a solid security background with more than 15 years worth of experience within the fields of reverse engineering and network security and forensics. He is also a central contributor, maintainer and driving force behind one of the world's most long-running and well-known online reverse engineering resources. 

For copies of the slides and additional materials please see the DEF CON 16 Archive here: https://defcon.org/html/links/dc-archives/dc-16-archive.html