Untraceable communication — guaranteed
Anonymity networks, which sit on top of the public Internet, are designed to conceal people’s Web-browsing habits from prying eyes. The most popular of these, Tor, has been around for more than a decade and is used by millions of people every day. Recent research, however, has shown that adversaries can infer a great deal about the sources of supposedly anonymous communications by monitoring data traffic though just a few well-chosen nodes in an anonymity network. At the Association for Computing Machinery Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in October, a team of MIT researchers presented a new, untraceable text-messaging system designed to thwart even the most powerful of adversaries. The system provides a strong mathematical guarantee of user anonymity, while, according to experimental results, permitting the exchange of text messages once a minute or so. “Tor operates under the assumption that there’s not a global adversary that’s paying attention to every single link...