Statistical Disclosure: Improved, Extended, and Resisted

Abstract

Traffic analysis is a type of attack on secure communications systems, in which the adversary extracts useful patterns and information from the observed traffic. This paper improves and extends an efficient traffic analysis attack, called "statistical disclosure attack." Moreover, we propose a solution to defend against the improved (and, a fortiori, the original) statistical disclosure attack. Our solution delays the attacker considerably, meaning that he should gather significantly more observations to be able to deduce meaningful information from the traffic.