This new Tor alternative hides your messages in a stream of spam

Given recent news that popular online anonymity tool Tor might not be as completely secure as many of us had assumed, we were intrigued to see that some researchers at MIT are now claiming that they’ve created a way to send completely “untraceable” text messages. A team at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) has developed a text messaging system that they say “provides a strong mathematical guarantee of user anonymity, while, according to experimental results, permitting the exchange of text messages once a minute or so.” The researchers have named the system “Vuvuzela,” which is a reference to the noise-making devices used by fans at football matches around the world. The idea behind the system is that, like a stadium full of vuvuzelas, it creates a lot of spurious “noise” that makes it difficult to pinpoint the sound being made by any individual vuvuzela. In its basic structure, the system sends messages through three different servers that are each designed to unwrap three different levels of encryption. While this obviously makes it harder for someone to intercept a message and to see its sender and recipient, CSAIL says that an adversary who compromises the integrity of the first server can still “know that two users whose messages reached the first server within some window of time have been talking.”