arXivDaily arXiv每日学术速递 周一至周五更新
arXiv 2005.00508cs.CR
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对安全消息应用的实用流量分析攻击

Practical Traffic Analysis Attacks on Secure Messaging Applications

Alireza Bahramali, Ramin Soltani, Amir Houmansadr, Dennis Goeckel, Don Towsley

摘要:

即时通讯(IM)应用程序,如Telegram,Signal和WhatsApp近年来变得非常流行。不幸的是,这种IM服务一直是政府持续监视和审查的目标,因为这些服务是关于社会和政治敏感话题的公共和私人通信渠道的所在地。为了保护他们的客户端,流行的IM服务部署了最先进的加密机制。在本文中,我们表明,尽管使用先进的加密,流行的IM应用程序泄漏的敏感信息,他们的客户端的对手谁只是监视他们的加密IM流量,没有必要利用任何软件漏洞的IM应用程序。具体来说,我们设计了流量分析攻击,使对手能够识别管理员以及目标IM渠道的成员(例如,论坛),具有较高的准确性。我们相信,我们的研究表明,一个重大的,现实世界的威胁,这些服务的用户越来越多的尝试,压迫政府在打击有争议的IM渠道。我们证明了我们的流量分析攻击的实用性,通过广泛的实验在现实世界中的IM通信。我们表明,标准的对策技术,如添加覆盖流量可以降低我们在本文中介绍的攻击的有效性。我们希望我们的研究将鼓励IM提供商将有效的流量混淆对策集成到他们的软件中。与此同时,我们已经设计并部署了一个开源的,公开可用的对策系统,称为IMProxy,它可以由IM客户端使用,而不需要IM提供商的任何支持。我们已经通过实验证明了IMProxy的有效性。

英文摘要:

Instant Messaging (IM) applications like Telegram, Signal, and WhatsApp have become extremely popular in recent years. Unfortunately, such IM services have been targets of continuous governmental surveillance and censorship, as these services are home to public and private communication channels on socially and politically sensitive topics. To protect their clients, popular IM services deploy state-of-the-art encryption mechanisms. In this paper, we show that despite the use of advanced encryption, popular IM applications leak sensitive information about their clients to adversaries who merely monitor their encrypted IM traffic, with no need for leveraging any software vulnerabilities of IM applications. Specifically, we devise traffic analysis attacks that enable an adversary to identify administrators as well as members of target IM channels (e.g., forums) with high accuracies. We believe that our study demonstrates a significant, real-world threat to the users of such services given the increasing attempts by oppressive governments at cracking down controversial IM channels. We demonstrate the practicality of our traffic analysis attacks through extensive experiments on real-world IM communications. We show that standard countermeasure techniques such as adding cover traffic can degrade the effectiveness of the attacks we introduce in this paper. We hope that our study will encourage IM providers to integrate effective traffic obfuscation countermeasures into their software. In the meantime, we have designed and deployed an open-source, publicly available countermeasure system, called IMProxy, that can be used by IM clients with no need for any support from IM providers. We have demonstrated the effectiveness of IMProxy through experiments.

机构、总结、中文摘要均由AI分析而来,可能存在错误,请以论文正文为准。

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