Riffle: Researchers from MIT and the Lausanne Polytechnic School in Switzerland have created a new anonymous network that claims to correct some of Tor's weaknesses.
It's called Riffle, and it works like Tor, but much more enhanced better safety, protecting the network from fraudsters trying to add malicious servers to the network, a technique known as a Sybil attack, to which Tor is vulnerable.
To ward off this kind of attack, the researchers made some changes to how Tor's basic principles work and created a new anonymous network from scratch.
First and foremost, Riffle uses a unique system for shuffling data to servers. If packages A, B, C enter a Riffle server, they are shuffled in a random order, and then sent in a completely different way (for example, C, A, B).
A malicious user who is following the progress of the message will not be able to guess when and which of the packets that has entered a Riffle node is set to leave.
Riffle does not completely change the way Tor works because it still uses the on-line Onion protocol to encrypt data with different encryption levels that are added or removed with each server change through which the message travels.
Έτσι, ένας εισβολέας except του ότι θα πρέπει να σπάσει την ασφάλεια που προσθέτει το Riffle, θα πρέπει να σπάσει και ασφάλεια του πρωτοκόλλου Onion.
Για τις επιθέσεις Sybil τώρα, το Riffle χρησιμοποιεί μια τεχνική που ονομάζεται "verifiable shuffle," (ή επαληθευμένο ανακάτεμα) το οποίο λειτουργεί πάνω από το πρωτόκολλο Onion.
"Η κρυπτογράφηση μπορεί να γίνει με τέτοιο τρόπο, ώστε ο διακομιστής να μπορεί να παραγάγει μια μαθηματική απόδειξη για το ότι τα μηνύματα που στέλνει διαχειρίζονται μόνο από τους αυτούς που τα λαμβάνουν," αναφέρει το MIT.
This is done with her Mission of the first message from a communication channel to all servers in the Riffle network. This message is used to establish secure connections for all servers along a message's path.
After the first message, the other communication channels use a less demanding CPU, authentication and encryption system, which is fairly safe and provides better data transfer speeds than Tor.
Researchers report that data transfers require one tenth of the year, compared to other anonymous networks.
More details on Riffle will be presented at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium in July in Darmstadt, Germany.
