
Anonymity Trilemma: Anonymity, Low Bandwidth Overhead, Low Latency – Choose Two - rendx
https://freedom.cs.purdue.edu/anonymity/index.html
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niftich
It's no accident that one can see a similar result in timing attacks and
information leakage from computer systems (e.g. Spectre and prior art),
because in both cases, statistical inferences are being made from observable
state.

Though this is an accessible paper that explores communication networks in
detail, I'd still like to see more of these analyses conducted from a more
abstract, information-theory perspective, and for these results to be broadly
applied in various concrete settings.

I wonder if these sorts of fundamental underpinnings don't interface nearly as
much with the daily mainstream line-of-business work that much of IT has
evolved towards as they do in some other fields of applied science and design.

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OedipusRex
Link to the paper itself (PDF):
[https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/954.pdf](https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/954.pdf)

Boiler Up!

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inflatableDodo
I always assumed that the lower bound for continuous required bandwidth on a
minimum latency anonymous network is the same or more than the peak required
bandwidth, as you essentially have to run fixed bandwidth number stations
between all nodes with either constant time between packets, or timing being
dependent on a high frequency stochastic source.

Does anyone know if any lower bound has been shown to be possible?

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SilasX
Would it be fair to say that Bitcoin picks anonymity and low bandwidth
overhead? Or does it not even qualify as anonymity in this sense? It
definitely has the high latency.

~~~
Qwertystop
> We leverage an indistinguishability-based anonymity notion for sender
> anonymity: the adversaryhas to distinguish two senders of its own choosing

Bitcoin doesn't provide that; a transaction involving one wallet can (if I
understand Bitcoin correctly) be distinguished from a transaction involving a
different wallet trivially.

It has anonymity only in that personal information is not required, but all
the information you do provide (that is, the key that identifies your wallet)
is entirely public. A wallet is a pseudonym.

The anonymity of Bitcoin is not the cause of its latency - instead, getting
anonymity out of Bitcoin requires extra work by the user (making more wallets,
and transferring money between them to avoid having to cluster them all in a
multi-input transaction that would identify them all as probably belonging to
one person). Getting anonymity would thus require an increase in both latency
and bandwidth (from the extra transactions plus any other money-laundering
work).

