An official website of the United States government
As interest in metadata-hiding communication grows in both research and practice, a need exists for stronger abuse reporting features on metadata-hiding platforms. While message franking has been deployed on major end-to-end encrypted platforms as a lightweight and effective abuse reporting feature, there is no comparable technique for metadata-hiding platforms. Existing efforts to support abuse reporting in this setting, such as asymmetric message franking or the Hecate scheme, require order of magnitude increases in client and server computation or fundamental changes to the architecture of messaging systems. As a result, while metadata-hiding communication inches closer to practice, critical content moderation concerns remain unaddressed. This paper demonstrates that, for broad classes of metadata-hiding schemes, lightweight abuse reporting can be deployed with minimal changes to the overall architecture of the system. Our insight is that much of the structure needed to support abuse reporting already exists in these schemes. By taking a non-generic approach, we can reuse this structure to achieve abuse reporting with minimal overhead. In particular, we show how to modify schemes based on secret sharing user inputs to support a message franking-style protocol. Compared to prior work, our shared franking technique more than halves the time to prepare a franked message and gives order of magnitude reductions in server-side message processing times, as well as in the time to decrypt a message and verify a report.
more »
« less
Hecate: Abuse Reporting in Secure Messengers with Sealed Sender
End-to-end encryption provides strong privacy protections to billions of people, but it also complicates efforts to moderate content that can seriously harm people. To address this concern, Tyagi et al. [CRYPTO 2019] introduced the concept of asymmetric message franking (AMF) so that people can report abusive content to a moderator, while otherwise retaining end-to-end privacy by default and compatibility with anonymous communication systems like Signal’s sealed sender. In this work, we provide a new construction for asymmetric message franking called Hecate that is faster, more secure, and introduces additional functionality compared to Tyagi et al. First, our construction uses fewer invocations of standardized crypto primitives and operates in the plain model. Second, on top of AMF’s accountability and deniability requirements, we also add forward and backward secrecy. Third, we combine AMF with source tracing, another approach to content moderation that has previously been considered only in the setting of non-anonymous networks. Source tracing allows for messages to be forwarded, and a report only identifies the original source who created a message. To provide anonymity for senders and forwarders, we introduce a model of AMF with preprocessing whereby every client authenticates with the moderator out-of-band to receive a token that they later consume when sending a message anonymously.
more »
« less
- PAR ID:
- 10358606
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 31st USENIX Security Symposium
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Private messaging platforms provide strong protection against platform eavesdropping, but malicious users can use privacy as cover for spreading abuse and misinformation. In an attempt to identify the sources of misinformation on private platforms, researchers have proposed mechanisms to trace back the source of a user-reported message (CCS '19,'21). Unfortunately, the threat model considered by initial proposals allowed a single user to compromise the privacy of another user whose legitimate content the reporting user did not like. More recent work has attempted to mitigate this side effect by requiring a threshold number of users to report a message before its origins can be identified (NDSS '22). However, the state of the art scheme requires the introduction of new probabilistic data structures and only achieves a fuzzy threshold guarantee. Moreover, false positives, where the source of an unreported message is identified, are possible. This paper introduces a new threshold source tracking technique that allows a private messaging platform, with the cooperation of a third-party moderator, to operate a threshold reporting scheme with exact thresholds and no false positives. Unlike prior work, our techniques require no modification of the message delivery process for a standard source tracking scheme, affecting only the abuse reporting procedure, and do not require tuning of probabilistic data structures.more » « less
-
Anonymous communication, that is secure end-to-end and unlinkable, plays a critical role in protecting user privacy by preventing service providers from using message metadata to discover communication links between any two users. Techniques, such as Mix-net, DC-net, time delay, cover traffic, Secure Multiparty Computation (SMC) and Private Information Retrieval, can be used to achieve anonymous communication. SMC-based approach generally offers stronger simulation based security guarantee. In this paper, we propose a simple and novel SMC approach to establishing anonymous communication, easily implementable with two non-colluding servers which have only communication and storage related capabilities. Our approach offers stronger security guarantee against malicious adversaries without incurring a great deal of extra computation. To show its practicality, we implemented our solutions using Chameleon Cloud to simulate the interactions among a million users, and extensive simulations were conducted to show message latency with various group sizes. Our approach is efficient for smaller group sizes and sub-group communication while preserving message integrity. Also, it does not have the message collision problem.more » « less
-
To be useful and widely accepted, automated contact tracing schemes (also called exposure notification) need to solve two seemingly contradictory problems at the same time: they need to protect the anonymity of honest users while also preventing malicious users from creating false alarms. In this paper, we provide, for the first time, an exposure notification construction that guarantees the same levels of privacy and integrity as existing schemes but with a fully malicious database (notably similar to Auerbach et al. CT-RSA 2021) without special restrictions on the adversary. We construct a new definition so that we can formally prove our construction secure. Our definition ensures the following integrity guarantees: no malicious user can cause exposure warnings in two locations at the same time and that any uploaded exposure notifications must be recent and not previously uploaded. Our construction is efficient, requiring only a single message to be broadcast at contact time no matter how many recipients are nearby. To notify contacts of potential infection, an infected user uploads data with size linear in the number of notifications, similar to other schemes. Linear upload complexity is not trivial with our assumptions and guarantees (a naive scheme would be quadratic). This linear complexity is achieved with a new primitive: zero knowledge subset proofs over commitments which is used by our no cloning proof protocol. We also introduce another new primitive: set commitments on equivalence classes, which makes each step of our construction more efficient. Both of these new primitives are of independent interest.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)We present a secure two-factor authentication (TFA) scheme based on the user’s possession of a password and a crypto-capable device. Security is “end-to-end” in the sense that the attacker can attack all parts of the system, including all communication links and any subset of parties (servers, devices, client terminals), can learn users’ passwords, and perform active and passive attacks, online and offline. In all cases the scheme provides the highest attainable security bounds given the set of compromised components. Our solution builds a TFA scheme using any Device-enhanced Password-authenticated Key Exchange (PAKE), defined by Jarecki et al., and any Short Authenticated String (SAS) Message Authentication, defined by Vaudenay. We show an efficient instantiation of this modular construction, which utilizes any password-based client-server authentication method, with or without reliance on public-key infrastructure. The security of the proposed scheme is proven in a formal model that we formulate as an extension of the traditional PAKE model. We also report on a prototype implementation of our schemes, including TLS-based and PKI-free variants, as well as several instantiations of the SAS mechanism, all demonstrating the practicality of our approach. Finally, we present a usability study evaluating the viability of our protocol contrasted with the traditional PIN-based TFA approach in terms of efficiency, potential for errors, user experience, and security perception of the underlying manual process. 1more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript
- Conference Paper:
- The DOI is not currently available.
