An Introduction to Traffic Analysis
George Danezis

A lot of traditional computer security has focused on protecting the content of communications by insuring confidentiality, integrity or availability. Yet the meta data associated with it - the sender, the receiver, the time and length of messages - also contains important information in itself. It can also be used to quickly select targets for further surveillance, and extract information about communications content. Such traffic analysis techniques have been used in the closed military communities for a while but their systematic study is an emerging field in the open security community.

This talk will present an overview of traffic analysis techniques, and how they can be used to extract data from 'secure' systems. We will consider both state of the art attacks in the academic literature, but also practical attacks against fielded systems.

Biography: Dr G. Danezis is a post-doctoral researcher on computer secutiy and privacy at K.U. Leuven. He was awared his doctorate from the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory under the supervision of Prof. R. J. Anderson. He has published over 20 accademic papers on the field of anonymous communications and traffic analysis, and is the co-chair of the Privacy Enhancing Technologies workshop in 2005.