Our research group's work on the limits of Internet anonymity and privacy. All traffic can be traced back to a unique IP address. This enables eavesdroppers to track the activities of the innocent public. At the same time, aspects of Internet communication make it difficult for law enformcement to track predators. Our goal has been to find the true characteristics of private or anonymous communication on the Internet.

We have looked at several attacks that break protocols for anonymity, largely based on traffic analysis. For example, we have looked at great detail at the predecessor and intersection attacks, both use only information about other proxies in the network.

Most recently, we have begun posing our research as an issue of computer forensics and investigations, which is the dual problem of privacy. We have presented a straightforward traffic analysis attack against encrypted HTTP streams that is surprisingly effective in identifying the source of web traffic. We have also evaluated forensic investigation of databases.

• Forensics: Databases and Traffic Analysis:
  • Patrick Stahlberg, Gerome Miklau, and B.N. Levine, "Threats to Privacy in the Forensic Analysis of Database Systems." In Proc. ACM SIGMOD/PODS, June 2007.
  • Gerome Miklau, Patrick Stahlberg, and Brian Neil Levine. "Securing History: Privacy and Accountability in Database Systems." In Biennial ACM/VLDB Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR), January 2007.
  • George Bissias, Marc Liberatore, David Jensen, and Brian Neil Levine, "Privacy Vulnerabilities in Encrypted HTTP Streams". In Proc. Privacy Enhancing Technologies Workshop (PET 2005).
  • Marc Liberatore, Brian Neil Levine, "Inferring the Source of Encrypted HTTP Connections". In Proc. ACM Computer and Communications Security (CCS) Alexandria, VA, October 2006.

• Analysis of different Attacks on Anonymous Protocols
  • Matt Wright, Micah Adler, Brian Neil Levine, and Clay Shields, The Predecessor Attack: An Analysis of a Threat to Anonymous Communications Systems. ACM Transactions on Information and Systems Security (TISSEC). Vol 7. Num 4. (By invitation)
  • Brian Neil Levine, Michael Reiter, Chenxi Wang, Matthew Wright Stopping Timing Attacks in Low-Latency Mix-Based Systems. in Proc. Financial Cryptography. February 2004. Nominee for the 2004 PET award
  • Matthew Wright, Micah Adler, Brian Neil Levine, and Clay Shields, "Defending Anonymous Communication Against Passive Logging Attacks". IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, Oakland, CA. May 2003.
  • Matthew Wright, Micah Adler, Brian Neil Levine, and Clay Shields, "An Analysis of the Degradation of Anonymous Protocols".in Proc. ISOC Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), February 2002. Received the Outstanding Paper Award.
  • Vincent Scarlata, Brian Neil Levine, and Clay Shields, "Responder Anonymity and Anonymous Peer-to-Peer File Sharing, in Proc. IEEE Intl. Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP). November 2001.
  • Clay Shields and Brian Neil Levine, "A Protocol for Anonymous Communication Over the Internet". Proc. ACM Conference on Computer and Communication Security (CCS). November 2000