MIT Develops Secure SMS System Which Is Even More Anonymous Than Tor

Short Bytes: Researchers at MIT have developed MIT Secure SMS system called Vuvuzela which is more secure than Tor anonymous system. This invention was made after the MIT researchers made a pattern discovery in the Tor system about the traffic pattern of the data.

Recently the researchers from MIT analyzed the patterns of packet directions passing through the each Tor Nodes. By analyzing the packet patterns, they could tell with 99% accuracy if a circuit was for a regular web browsing or an introduction point (a point when a user begins to accessing the hidden websites).

This discovery by MIT researchers led to the designing of MIT Secure message system which is untraceable and more secure than Tor.

Also read: Tor or VPN? Which provides better anonymity?

Learning from the above discovery, MIT now has developed a fully anonymous system which can be used to exchange a text message between two people in an anonymous way roughly once a minute.

Here is how it works:

First of all, a user leaves a message for another user at some predefined location, at a memory address in the internet-connected dead drop server.
Irrespective of if a user is sending a message or not, the system keeps on sending messages to the server at regular interval to conceal the traffic pattern.
For example, there are three persons using the system and only two exchanging the messages, still the third person system will keep on generating some packets and sending it to the server
However, sending spoof messages is just to fake the traffic. A piece of the message can still be tracked by an eavesdropper.
So to make the whole process more security-proof, three level encryption has been added on three different servers.
First server decrypts the topmost authentication header and passes the message on to the second server. The Second server does the same and passes the message to the third server.
Thus, only the third server can know which message belong to which memory address and so to which user.

This whole anonymous MIT secure message system has been termed as “VuvuZela”. An open access paper has also presented on the same named “Vuvuzela: Scalable Private Messaging Resistant to Traffic Analysis” at ACM on OS principles.

Add your views about this new secure SMS system in the comments below.

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