Orwell Was an Optimist

摘要

George Orwell's book 1984 foresaw a future where television continuously surveilled the inhabitants of Oceania. It was a terrifying world where everyone knew they were constantly watched. This paper discusses our current situation where cell phones, automobiles, and computers provide easily accessible information to interested parties. Anonymity is increasingly difficult to maintain, especially on-line. We provide a brief introduction to currently available anonymity tools, followed with a discussion of their vulnerability to traffic analysis attacks. We state known attacks in the current literature and mention the preferred anonymity metric. Our current research uses an extension of hidden Markov models to exploit these vulnerabilities.