hidden voip calling records from networking intermediaries
While confidentiality of telephone conversation contents has recently received considerable attention in Internet telephony (VoIP), the protection of the caller--callee relation is largely unexplored. From the privacy research community we learn that this relation can be protected by Chaum's mixes. In early proposals of mix networks, however, it was reasonable to assume that high latency is acceptable. While the general idea has been deployed for low latency networks as well, important security measures had to be dropped for achieving performance. The result is protection against a considerably weaker adversary model in exchange for usability. In this paper, we show that it is unjustified to conclude that low latency network applications imply weak protection. On the contrary, we argue that current Internet telephony protocols provide a range of promising preconditions for adopting anonymity services with security properties similar to those of high latency anonymity networks. We expect that implementing anonymity services becomes a major challenge as customer privacy becomes one of the most important secondary goals in any (commercial) Internet application.
voip mixes anonymity traffic analysis attacks