Private resource allocators and their applications

Sebastian Angel; Sampath Kannan; Zachary Ratliff

Paper 2020/287

Private resource allocators and their applications

Sebastian Angel, Sampath Kannan, and Zachary Ratliff

Abstract

This paper introduces a new cryptographic primitive called a private resource allocator (PRA) that can be used to allocate resources (e.g., network bandwidth, CPUs) to a set of clients without revealing to the clients whether any other clients received resources. We give several constructions of PRAs that provide guarantees ranging from information-theoretic to differential privacy. PRAs are useful in preventing a new class of attacks that we call allocation-based side-channel attacks. These attacks can be used, for example, to break the privacy guarantees of anonymous messaging systems that were designed specifically to defend against side-channel and traffic analysis attacks. Our implementation of PRAs in Alpenhorn, which is a recent anonymous messaging system, shows that PRAs increase the network resources required to start a conversation by up to 16X (can be made as low as 4X in some cases), but add no overhead once the conversation has been established.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Cryptographic protocols
Publication info: Published elsewhere. IEEE Security and Privacy (S&P) 2020
Keywords: resource allocation side channels information theory
Contact author(s): sebastian angel @ cis upenn edu
History: 2020-03-06: received
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2020/287
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2020/287,
      author = {Sebastian Angel and Sampath Kannan and Zachary Ratliff},
      title = {Private resource allocators and their applications},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2020/287},
      year = {2020},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/287}
}