Tyler Kell — Towards Usable Dining Crypto Networks w Howl — DEF CON 27 Crypto and Privacy Village

Anonymous communication is important for dissidents, activists, whistleblowers, journalists, and any individuals that might be under surveillance by other parties. Dining Cryptographer Networks (DC-Nets) provide the strongest anonymity protections and the lowest possible latency of any current cryptographic solution. Unfortunately DC-Nets are faced with three fatal flaws that prevent their deployment in the real world: prohibitive bandwidth consumption, denial of service attacks (DoS) by participants, and low fault tolerance. In this talk, I will present Howl, our new open source project and decentralized anonymity network that solves these issues to make DC-Nets usable in the real world. We leverage a new aggregation protocol for bandwidth and fault tolerance issues, and use trusted execution environments (TEEs) to prevent DoS. All privacy is handled by the DC-net protocol and at no point does broadcast privacy rely on the trusted execution environment or aggregation network.

BIO
Tyler Kell is a Research Engineer at Cornell Tech in New York City. In a prior life, before becoming a researcher, he worked as a penetration tester and security consultant.