Simon Langowski (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Sacha Servan-Schreiber (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Srinivas Devadas (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Trellis is a mix-net based anonymous broadcast system with cryptographic security guarantees. Trellis can be used to anonymously publish documents or communicate with other users, all while assuming full network surveillance. In Trellis, users send messages through a set of servers in successive rounds. The servers mix and post the messages to a public bulletin board, hiding which users sent which messages.

Trellis hides all network-level metadata, remains robust to changing network conditions, guarantees availability to honest users, and scales with the number of mix servers. Trellis provides three to five orders of magnitude faster performance and better network robustness compared to Atom, the state-of-the-art anonymous broadcast system with a similar threat model. In achieving these guarantees, Trellis contributes: (1) a simpler theoretical mixing analysis for a routing mix network constructed with a fraction of malicious servers, (2) anonymous routing tokens for verifiable random paths, and (3) lightweight blame protocols built on top of onion routing to identify and eliminate malicious parties.

We implement and evaluate Trellis in a networked deployment. With 64 servers located across four geographic regions, Trellis achieves a throughput of 220 bits per second with 100,000 users. With 128 servers, Trellis achieves a throughput of 320 bits per second. Trellis’s throughput is only 100 to 1000× slower compared to Tor (which has 6,000 servers and 2M daily users) and is therefore potentially deployable at a smaller “enterprise” scale. Our implementation is open-source.

View More Papers

InfoMasker: Preventing Eavesdropping Using Phoneme-Based Noise

Peng Huang (Zhejiang University), Yao Wei (Zhejiang University), Peng Cheng (Zhejiang University), Zhongjie Ba (Zhejiang University), Li Lu (Zhejiang University), Feng Lin (Zhejiang University), Fan Zhang (Zhejiang University), Kui Ren (Zhejiang University)

Read More

Extrapolating Formal Analysis to Uncover Attacks in Bluetooth Passkey...

Mohit Kumar Jangid (The Ohio State University), Yue Zhang (Computer Science & Engineering, Ohio State University), Zhiqiang Lin (The Ohio State University)

Read More

Un-Rocking Drones: Foundations of Acoustic Injection Attacks and Recovery...

Jinseob Jeong (KAIST, Agency for Defense Development), Dongkwan Kim (Samsung SDS), Joonha Jang (KAIST), Juhwan Noh (KAIST), Changhun Song (KAIST), Yongdae Kim (KAIST)

Read More

Access Your Tesla without Your Awareness: Compromising Keyless Entry...

Xinyi Xie (Shanghai Fudan Microelectronics Group Co., Ltd.), Kun Jiang (Shanghai Fudan Microelectronics Group Co., Ltd.), Rui Dai (Shanghai Fudan Microelectronics Group Co., Ltd.), Jun Lu (Shanghai Fudan Microelectronics Group Co., Ltd.), Lihui Wang (Shanghai Fudan Microelectronics Group Co., Ltd.), Qing Li (State Key Laboratory of ASIC & System, Fudan University), Jun Yu (State Key…

Read More