Commentary by Mark Wahl, CISA
Organizing principles for identity systems:
Identity in paths in anonymizing networks (20070619)
The 2005 paper "Low-cost traffic analysis of Tor" by Steven Murdoch and George Danezis of the University of Cambridge identifies attacks against the Tor Onion Router network. As Tor nodes did not perform traffic shaping, and these nodes would allow arbitrary users (including attackers) to submit into the network,
"The ability to route over the anonymous communication network, that anyone has, can be used to estimate the traffic load on specific Tor nodes accurately enough to perform traffic-analysis."
And as Tor nodes reuse paths through the network,
"The observable path of each stream can act as an identifier or identity that links streams amongst themselves and to the initator - a property that makes Tor weaker than a simple proxy when it comes to protecting the unlinkability of actions."
In the Tom Lehrer (currently at Erdős number 4) song "Lobachevsky" on his 1953 album Songs by Tom Lehrer,
"I am never forget the day I am given first original paper to write. It was on analytic and algebraic topology of locally Euclidean metrization of infinitely-differentiable Riemannian manifolds.
Bozhe moi!
This I know from nothing. But I think of great Lobachevsky and I get idea - haha!"
the narrator leverages his social network to find someone who is solving that same problem, and plagarizes his work.
The song does not give the names of the people in the network, only their link order and geolocation,
and the victim in Dnepropetrovsk is only made aware of the identity of the narrator
"When he finds out
I published first!"
Intriguingly, the song indicates that the response followed a slightly different path to the request, adding two cities. Perhaps the request prefigured the 1967 small world experiments, in which the forwarding participants do not know the full path but only use their own contacts to forward the request, or perhaps the extra nodes were added to make the process of finding out the identity of the originator of the request (the narrator) more difficult for the victim.