Pirates: Anonymous Group Calls Over Fully Untrusted Infrastructure

Abstract

Anonymous metadata-private voice call protocols suffer from high delays and so far cannot provide group call functionality. Anonymization inherently yields delay penalties, and scaling signalling and communication to groups of users exacerbates this situation. Our protocol Pirates employs PIR, improves parallelization and signalling, and is the first group voice call protocol that guarantees the strong anonymity notion of communication unobservability. Implementing and measuring a prototype, we show that Pirates with a single server can support group calls with three group members from an 11 concurrent users with mouth-to-ear latency below 365ms, meeting minimum ITU requirements as the first anonymous voice call system. Increasing the number of servers enables bigger group sizes and more participants.