S-FMD Threat Model

Open vs Closed World Setting

The previous literature on FMD (e.g. Beck et al. 2021, Seres et al. 2021) focuses on a model we will call the closed world setting where:

  • A single untrusted server performs FMD on behalf of users. This server has all detection keys.
  • All users in the messaging system use FMD.

This is appropriate for a messaging application using a single centralized server where FMD is a requirement at the protocol-level.

However, Penumbra operates in what we will call the open world setting in which:

  • Multiple untrusted servers perform FMD on behalf of users, i.e. there is no single centralized detection server with all detection keys.
  • Not all users use FMD: in Penumbra FMD is opt-in. A fraction of Penumbra users will download all messages, and never provide detection keys to a third party.

A further difference in Penumbra is that the total number of distinct users is unknown. Each user can create multiple addresses, and they choose whether or not to derive a detection key for a given address.

Assumptions

We assume the FMD construction is secure and the properties of correctness, fuzziness (false positives are detected with rate ), and detection ambiguity (the server cannot distinguish between false and true positives) hold as described in the previous section.

All parties malicious or otherwise can access the public chain state, e.g. the current and historical global network activity rates and the current and historical network false positive rates.

Each detection server also observes which messages are detected, but only for the detection keys they have been given. No detection server has detection keys for all users, since only a subset of users opt-in to FMD.

A malicious detection server can passively compare the detected sets between users. They can also perform active attacks, sending additional messages to artificially increase global network volume, or to the user to increase the number of true positives. We consider these attacks in the next section. In the open world setting, multiple malicious detection servers may be attempting to boost traffic globally, or may target the same user. Malicious detection servers may collude, sharing the sets of detection keys they have in order to jointly maximize the information they learn about network activity.

We assume no detection servers have access to sender metadata, as would be the case if participants routed their traffic through a network privacy layer such as Tor.

A passive eavesdropper can observe the network traffic between recipient and detection server, and attempt to infer the number of messages they have downloaded. We assume the connection between the detection server and recipient is secured using HTTPS.