Resistance to NSA-Level Global Adversaries With the Nym MixNet

Ania Piotrowska Saturday, July 25, 2020: 1200. Anonymous communication networks, such as Tor, are vital to maintain our privacy against adversaries that can monitor our network traffic to collect metadata like IP addresses. However, Tor does not def...

Ania Piotrowska

Saturday, July 25, 2020: 1200. Anonymous communication networks, such as Tor, are vital to maintain our privacy against adversaries that can monitor our network traffic to collect metadata like IP addresses. However, Tor does not defend against global passive adversaries that can observe the input and output of the entire network, such as all the traffic going in and out of Tor entry and exit nodes. For message-based systems, it has been shown that mix networks that reorder (mix) packets can defend against these nation-state level adversaries. After years of research as part of the European Commission PANORAMIX project and one year of coding, the Nym project has launched its generic, Rust-based MixNet code. This talk will demonstrate how a mix network can eliminate even timing information from a chat application, and how developers can build on top of this new mix networking framework.