MsgFilter: Proactive Anti-Harassment Sender-Anonymous Messaging System

Abstract

Anonymous submissions inspire people to speak up since hiding their identities can protect them from negative influence by their own words. However, the abuse of anonymity may bring harassment to those public submission callers. Existing works only handle DoS attacks or block harassment senders in an active manner, which behave poorly in the early prevention of uncharacterized harassment. In this paper, we propose MsgFliter, a sender-anonymous messaging system with proactive anti-harassment mechanism. Our core idea is to prevent unanswered senders from sending messages continually while keeping their identities, messages, and sender types secret. To meet the functionality and security requirements of MsgFliter, we propose the Anti-Harassment Anonymous Authentication (AHAA) protocol. We associate messages from the same sender through linkable tags and invalidate linkability when a message is replied to. To achieve session indistinguishability, we further combine the proposed anonymous authentication with zero-knowledge proofs of disjunctive relations. We implement MsgFliter and compare its performance with related solutions. Experimental results show that our solution is practicable.