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[FYI] (Fwd) U.S. government patents "Onion Routing" anon browsing techniques
- To: debate@lists.fitug.de
- Subject: [FYI] (Fwd) U.S. government patents "Onion Routing" anon browsing techniques
- From: "Axel H Horns" <horns@ipjur.com>
- Date: Sat, 18 Aug 2001 17:24:00 +0200
------- Forwarded message follows -------
Date sent: Sat, 18 Aug 2001 10:33:48 -0400
To: cryptography@wasabisystems.com
From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
Subject: U.S. government patents "Onion Routing" anon browsing technique
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,46126,00.html
Pentagon Hides Behind Onion Wraps
By Declan McCullagh (declan@wired.com)
2:00 a.m. Aug. 17, 2001 PDT
[...]
[Paul] Syverson said that the U.S. government was awarded patent
number 6,266,704 for Onion Routing on July 24.
That announcement prompted an angry reaction from Usenix
attendees, many of whom are programmers, security consultants and
system administrators, who aren't big fans of software patents --
especially in the area of anonymous communications, where there's
been so much prior work before the Navy ever got involved.
Mathematician David Chaum, for instance, wrote an article titled
"Untraceable Electronic Mail, Return Addresses and Digital
Pseudonyms" for Communications of the ACM as far back as 1981.
Lance Cottrell, who now runs anonymizer.com, wrote part of the
mixmaster system in the early 1990s, and similar techniques were
discussed on the cypherpunks mailing list even earlier.
Syverson, who is listed on the patent with co-inventors Michael
Reed and David Goldschlag, defended the government's move. "It is
a necessary step for those of us working for the government to
bring technology to the public," Syverson said.
The patent describes Onion Routing, which has been the subject of
analysis at previous security conferences, as providing "an
electronic communication path between an initiator and a responder
on a packet-switching network comprising an onion routing network
that safeguards against traffic analysis and eavesdropping by
other users of the packet switching network" such as the Internet.
[...]
*********
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PA
LL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1='6,266,704'.WKU.&OS=PN/
6,266,704&RS=PN/6,266,704
United States Patent 6,266,704
Reed , et al. July 24, 2001
________________________________________________________________
_
Onion routing network for securely moving data through
communication networks
Abstract
The onion routing network is used to protect Internet initiators
and responders against both eavesdropping and traffic analysis
from other users of the Internet. In the onion routing of the
invention, instead of making connections directly to a responding
machine, users make connections through onion routers. The onion
routing network allows the connection between the initiator and
responder to remain anonymous. Anonymous connections hide who is
connected to whom and for what purpose from outside eavesdroppers.
________________________________________________________________
_
Inventors: Reed; Michael G. (Bethesda, MD); Syverson; Paul F.
(Silver Spring, MD); Goldschlag; David M. (Silver Spring, MD)
Assignee: The United States of America as represented by the
Secretary of the Navy (Washington, DC) Appl. No.: 086541 Filed:
May 29, 1998
[...]
________________________________________________________________
_
Description
________________________________________________________________
_
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1.0 Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of moving user
real-time data within a communication network and, more
particularly, to a system which moves data within a communication
network, such as the Internet, without revealing the identity of
the initiator of the data, nor the identity of the receiver of the
data, nor the content of the data. 2.0 Description of the Prior
Art The present invention is concerned with the right to privacy
involved in electronic communication which may be better described
by first discussing other forms of more commonly known
communications. For example, letters sent through the Post Office
are usually in an envelope marked with the sender's and
recipient's addresses. The general public trusts that the Post
Office does not peek inside the envelope, because the contents are
private. The general public also trusts that the Post Office does
not monitor who sends mail to whom, because that information is
also considered private. These two types of sensitive information,
the contents of an envelope and its addresses, apply equally well
to electronic communication over the Internet. As the Internet
becomes an increasing important part of modern day communication
and electronic commerce, protecting the privacy of electronic
messages also becomes increasingly important. Just like mail,
electronic messages travel in envelopes, that is, electronic
envelopes. Protecting the privacy of electronic messages requires
both safeguarding the contents of their envelopes and hiding the
addresses on their envelopes. Although communicating parties
usually identify themselves to one another, there is no reason
that the use of a public network, such as the Internet, ought to
reveal to others who is talking to whom and what they are talking
about. The first concern is traffic analysis, the latter is
eavesdropping. By making both eavesdropping and traffic analysis
hard, the privacy of communication is protected. However,
anonymity need not be completely maintained because two parties
communicating with each other may need to identify each other. For
example, if a Web surfer wants to buy something using the
electronic equivalent of cash, the purchaser may need to be
identified to properly establish the debt being incurred; however,
the network need not know any of this information. If an
electronic envelope keeps its contents private, and the address on
the envelope is also hidden, then any identifying information can
only be inside the envelope. So for anonymous communication, we
also should remove identifying information from the contents of an
envelope. This may be called anonymizing a private envelope. An
anonymous connection is a communications channel for which it is
infeasible to determine both endpoints, that is, which principal
initiated the communication and whom receives the communication.
The principal initiating the connection is the initiator, and the
principal to whom the initiator connects is the responder. The
present invention implements a mechanism for anonymous connections
that operates below the application layer and supports a variety
of Internet applications, wherein the application layer is the
highest layer within the hierarchy of the protocols being used to
perform the data transfer. The usage of anonymous communication is
known and generally referred to by the use of various terms in the
art. For example, anonymous "Mixes" were introduced in 1985 as a
store and forward mechanism for anonymously moving data through a
network. These Mixes are not suitable for bidirectional real-time
communication which is of importance to the present invention.
Anonymous remailers, also known in the art, have been used to
store and forward mail from a sender to a recipient without
revealing the identity of the sender to observers of the network.
Different versions of these remailers use Mixes in a highly
application specific way which limits their applicability for
other uses. Anonymous bidirectional real-time communication for
Integrated Service Digital Network (ISDN) has also been explored,
especially as in related phone switching means. Mixes are
incorporated into an ISDN phone switch to permit anonymous
connections between callers within the same ISDN switch. The usage
of these anonymous connection means is dependent upon the
characteristics of the ISDN phone switches which, in turn, has
inherent limitations which, in turn, limit their usage. The first
mention of near real-time Mixes for the Internet appears in the
Pipe-Net techniques also known in the art. Pipe-Net's design
provides fixed bandwidth, low-capacity communications channels
strongly protected against both active and passive traffic
analysis attacks. However, the fixed bandwidth and low-capacity
communication limit their usage. Further, to our knowledge this
Pipe-Net's design has never been built, fully described, nor
formally published. The anonymizer, known in the art, provides
weak protection against traffic analysis of World Wide Web (WEB)
communications, by providing a centralized service that removes
identifying information from the data stream. So called "Crowds"
extends this approach to decentralize the proxy. However, the
Anonymizer does not protect against passive attacks at the
centralized proxy; whereas Crowds does not protect against global
passive attacks. It is desired to provide a general purpose system
that allows anonymous connections to move data through a
communication network and that does not suffer the drawbacks of
the prior art.
[...]
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