Anonymity and traceability in cyberspace

Traceability is the ability to map events in cyberspace, particularly on the Internet, back to real-world instigators, often with a view to holding them accountable for their actions. Anonymity is present when traceability fails. I examine how traceability on the Internet actually works, looking first at a classical approach from the late 1990s that emphasises the rôle of activity logging and reporting on the failures that are known to occur. Failures of traceability, with consequent unintentional anonymity, have continued as the technology has changed. I present an analysis that ascribes these failures to the mechanisms at the edge of the network being inherently inadequate for the burden that traceability places upon them. The underlying reason for this continuing failure is a lack of economic incentives for improvement. The lack of traceability at the edges is further illustrated by a new method of stealing another person's identity on an Ethernet Local Area Network that existing tools and procedures would entirely fail to detect. Preserving activity logs is seen, especially by Governments, as essential for the traceability of illegal cyberspace activity. I present a new and efficient method of processing email server logs to detect machines sending bulk unsolicited email " spam " or email infected with " viruses ". This creates a clear business purpose for creating logs, but the new detector is so effective that the logs can be discarded within days, which may hamper general traceability. Preventing spam would be far better than tracing its origin or detecting its transmission. Many analyse spam in economic terms, and wish to levy a small charge for sending each email. I consider an oft-proposed approach using computational " proof-of-work " that is elegant and anonymity preserving. I show that, in a world of high profit margins and insecure end-user machines, it is impossible to find a payment level that stops the spam without affecting legitimate usage of email. Finally, I consider a content-blocking system with a hybrid design that has been deployed by a UK Internet Service Provider to inhibit access to child pornography. I demonstrate that the two-level design can be circumvented at either level, that content providers can use the first level to attack the second, and that the selectivity of the first level can be used as an " oracle " to extract a list of the sites being blocked. Although many of these attacks can be countered, there …