Resistance to NSA-Level Global Adversaries With the Nym MixNet

Presented at HOPE 2020 Virtual Rescheduled, July 25, 2020, noon (50 minutes).

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.


Presenters:

  • Ania Piotrowska
    **Ania Piotrowska** did her PhD in anonymous communications systems under George Danezis at University College London, who also designed the original "Mixmaster" mix network used by anonymous "cypherpunk" re-mailers. As part of the PANORAMIX project, she published her core design, Loopix, in 2017 at USENIX and is now working to make an open source, performant mix network at Nym Technologies SA as their head of research.<br>

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