In this talk, I will introduce the problem of how to provide anonymity, i.e., hide who communicates with whom, in a communications system. We will focus on mixes, the main building blocks of high-latency anonymous communication channels, explaining how they work in order to hide the correspondences between the senders and receivers of messages, and we will overview the basic attacks against these devices. Finally, we will see how to optimize the design of the system in order to achieve better privacy guarantees.
Simon Oya received the Telecommunication Engineer degree from the University of Vigo, Spain, in 2012, and the master's degree in Signal Processing in Communications, in 2014. He is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree in Telecommunication Engineering in the same university. His research interest is the study of privacy-preserving technologies from a signal processing point of view, focusing on anonymous communication channels.