Title
A Secure Submission System for Online Whistleblowing Platforms
Abstract
Whistleblower laws protect individuals who inform the public or an authority about governmental or corporate misconduct. Despite these laws, whistleblowers frequently risk reprisals and sites such as WikiLeaks emerged to provide a level of anonymity to these individuals. However, as countries increase their level of network surveillance and Internet protocol data retention, the mere act of using anonymizing software such as Tor, or accessing a whistleblowing website through an SSL channel might be incriminating enough to lead to investigations and repercussions. As an alternative submission system we propose an online advertising network called AdLeaks. AdLeaks leverages the ubiquity of unsolicited online advertising to provide complete sender unobservability when submitting disclosures. AdLeaks ads compute a random function in a browser and submit the outcome to the AdLeaks infrastructure. Such a whistleblower's browser replaces the output with encrypted information so that the transmission is indistinguishable from that of a regular browser. Its back-end design assures that AdLeaks must process only a fraction of the resulting traffic in order to receive disclosures with high probability. We describe the design of AdLeaks and evaluate its performance through analysis and experimentation.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1007/978-3-642-39884-1_30
Financial Cryptography
DocType
Volume
Citations 
Journal
abs/1301.6263
4
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.72
28
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Volker Roth11142111.35
Benjamin Güldenring2293.10
Eleanor Rieffel348848.71
Sven Dietrich442.07
Lars Ries551.07