[Freedombox-discuss] Keeping the noise level up to avoid traffic analysis?

[pere@hungry.com (Petter Reinholdtsen)]

[Bob Mottram]
> It's a reasonable enough idea and worth a try so long as the amount of
> decoy traffic isn't too high.  However, the threat model for this case
> is sophisticated data mining on the traffic graph, and over a time
> series such techniques may be able to filter out predictable user
> patterns from background noise.

This is not the only threat model I had in mind.  It is known that some
network monitoring actors pay special attention to everyone visiting
some web pages, and by sharing URLs we can make sure "everyone" visit
"every" page visited by someone, making sure those tracking visits to
some web pages get a lot of noise.  We also make sure the value of any
legal proof of "this machine own by this person visited these pages"
become a lot smaller.

> One way to try to counter that might be to build decoy personas whose
> fictitious web browsing activity has the same degree of statistical
> predictability/variance as the real user.  It would be tricky to
> implement, but perhaps not impossible.

Well, it really should impersonate some other user too. :)

-- 
Happy hacking
Petter Reinholdtsen