Nym's Plan to Boost Internet Privacy Through 'Mixnets' (quantamagazine.org) 22
Harry Halpin helped create uniform cryptography standards for the World Wide Web Consortium, reports Quanta magazine — but "he also wanted to protect the lower, foundational level: the network through which the information is transmitted.
"In 2018, he started Nym Technologies to take on this problem.... Halpin spoke with Quanta from Nym's headquarters in Neuchâtel, Switzerland." Halpin: The trickier problem is this: How do I communicate with you so that no one else knows I'm communicating with you, even if our messages are encrypted? You can get a sense of what people are saying from the pattern of communication: Who are you talking with, when are your conversations, how long do they last...?
There are two key elements: One is the "mixnet," a technology invented by David Chaum in 1979 that my team has improved. It relies on the premise that you can't be anonymous by yourself; you can only be anonymous in a crowd. You start with a message and break it into smaller units, communications packets, that you can think of as playing cards. Next, you encrypt each card and randomly send it to a "mixnode" — a computer where it will be mixed with cards from other senders. This happens three separate times and at three separate mixnodes. Then each card is delivered to the intended recipient, where all the cards from the original message are decrypted and put back into the proper order. No person who oversees mixing at a single mixnode can know both the card's origin and its destination. In other words, no one can know who you are talking to.
Q: That was the original mixnet, so what improvements have you made?
Halpin: For one thing, we make use of the notion of entropy, a measure of randomness that was invented for this application by Claudia Diaz, a computer privacy professor at KU Leuven and Nym's chief scientist. Each packet you receive on the Nym network has a probability attached to it that tells you, for instance, the odds that it came from any given individual.... Our system uses a statistical process that allows you both to measure entropy and to maximize it — the greater the entropy, the greater the anonymity. There are no other systems out there today that can let users know how private their communications are.
Q: What's the second key element you referred to?
Halpin: Mixnets, as I said, have been around a long time. The reason they've never taken off has a lot to do with economics. Where do the people who are going to do the mixing come from, and how do you pay them? We think we have an answer. And the kernel of that idea came from a conversation I had in 2017 with Adam Back, a cryptographer who developed bitcoin's central "proof of work" algorithm. I asked him what he would do if he were to redesign bitcoin. He said it would be great if all the computer processing done to verify cryptocurrency transactions — by solving so-called Merkle puzzles that have no practical value outside of bitcoin — could instead be used to ensure privacy.
The computationally expensive part of privacy is the mixing, so it occurred to me that we could use a bitcoin-inspired system to incentivize people to do the mixing. We built our company around that idea....
A new paper that came out in June shows that this approach can lead to an economically sustainable mixnet....
We are not building a currency system or trying to replace the dollar. We just want to provide privacy to ordinary people.
"In 2018, he started Nym Technologies to take on this problem.... Halpin spoke with Quanta from Nym's headquarters in Neuchâtel, Switzerland." Halpin: The trickier problem is this: How do I communicate with you so that no one else knows I'm communicating with you, even if our messages are encrypted? You can get a sense of what people are saying from the pattern of communication: Who are you talking with, when are your conversations, how long do they last...?
There are two key elements: One is the "mixnet," a technology invented by David Chaum in 1979 that my team has improved. It relies on the premise that you can't be anonymous by yourself; you can only be anonymous in a crowd. You start with a message and break it into smaller units, communications packets, that you can think of as playing cards. Next, you encrypt each card and randomly send it to a "mixnode" — a computer where it will be mixed with cards from other senders. This happens three separate times and at three separate mixnodes. Then each card is delivered to the intended recipient, where all the cards from the original message are decrypted and put back into the proper order. No person who oversees mixing at a single mixnode can know both the card's origin and its destination. In other words, no one can know who you are talking to.
Q: That was the original mixnet, so what improvements have you made?
Halpin: For one thing, we make use of the notion of entropy, a measure of randomness that was invented for this application by Claudia Diaz, a computer privacy professor at KU Leuven and Nym's chief scientist. Each packet you receive on the Nym network has a probability attached to it that tells you, for instance, the odds that it came from any given individual.... Our system uses a statistical process that allows you both to measure entropy and to maximize it — the greater the entropy, the greater the anonymity. There are no other systems out there today that can let users know how private their communications are.
Q: What's the second key element you referred to?
Halpin: Mixnets, as I said, have been around a long time. The reason they've never taken off has a lot to do with economics. Where do the people who are going to do the mixing come from, and how do you pay them? We think we have an answer. And the kernel of that idea came from a conversation I had in 2017 with Adam Back, a cryptographer who developed bitcoin's central "proof of work" algorithm. I asked him what he would do if he were to redesign bitcoin. He said it would be great if all the computer processing done to verify cryptocurrency transactions — by solving so-called Merkle puzzles that have no practical value outside of bitcoin — could instead be used to ensure privacy.
The computationally expensive part of privacy is the mixing, so it occurred to me that we could use a bitcoin-inspired system to incentivize people to do the mixing. We built our company around that idea....
A new paper that came out in June shows that this approach can lead to an economically sustainable mixnet....
We are not building a currency system or trying to replace the dollar. We just want to provide privacy to ordinary people.
Incentivize (Score:2)
That's why the onion network and the Tor browser never took off. Because they lacked bitcoin.
Nym's mixes are homo-genius. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
She has quite a pedigree.
https://www.researchgate.net/s... [researchgate.net]
Adressing the non-problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Users aren't tracked by their IP-Adresses anymore, they are now tracked by cookies and Javascript. Sending the traffic through a mixer won't achieve anything unless you first get rid of all the other tracking mechanisms.
Re: Adressing the non-problem (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Users aren't tracked by their IP-Adresses anymore, they are now tracked by cookies and Javascript. Sending the traffic through a mixer won't achieve anything unless you first get rid of all the other tracking mechanisms.
Is the solution to automatically open each new web browser tab as new virtual machine and to delete this vm as soon as you close the tab?
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe, though since browser fingerprinting exists, this may not be effective. I for one argue that perhaps we should _now_ look at alternatives to the web, just like we did with commercial "online services" in the 1990s. There are initiatives like the web0 manifesto or people who want to modernize gopher. In fact there are events where the ticket sale is via ssh. (they still sell out in a few days)
Re: (Score:1)
Or perhaps browsers should become a lot more stingy with the information they give out. For compatibility, you might still need to return something, but if every browser claims to be the same standard browser with the same version, the same screen resolution and so on, that info would become worthless.
Re: (Score:1)
that is very interesting idea. Could be done by having all the browser actually render the same resultion and then scale it for the display. The side-effect is that it would help solve layout issues in frontend.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Cookies and Javascript are browser problems, and browsers are taking steps to address them.
This is similar to Tor, where the source of packets is obfuscated. They seem to have added a messaging layer on top, similar to Cwtch.
I'm not seeing anything new here, unless I missed something. Cwtch has solved all these issues for messaging, and Tor with the Tor Browser for the web. I guess if they can become ubiquitous it would help, but that's a tall order. Also you can get a VPN and chain two servers together for
Re: (Score:2)
Only because the they can't. With widespread use of NAT in its various forms, dozens or more users can be hidden behind a single IP address that IP address tracking is useless (especially if you're on LTE or 5G and thus use a IPv6 to IPv4 gateway since those networks don't support IPv4).
IP t
Re: (Score:2)
With fiber and other high bandwidth options, IP addresses tend to be almost static, in that they don't change but are marked as dynamic. Cookies and Javascript help, but don't think for a moment your IP is not being used for tracking.
That's a bold statement, Cotton... (Score:4, Funny)
Uh huh... and I make use of the notion of flaming, a measure of disbelief that was invented for this application by Slashdot.
He said it first (Score:2)
He said Anonymous crowd Beavis
DNS is cleartext (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
DNS over HTTPS [wikipedia.org] has been around since 2018. While it's not without its own problems (see the implementation considerations section), it certainly plugs the gaping hole of actors in a privileged network position being able to snoop on your DNS traffic.
Re: DNS is cleartext (Score:2)
fail, fail (Score:2)
It was a bad idea. The peers should do the mixing. The idea that you need special mix nodes is why this won't work. That just means that bad actors are motivated to make mix nodes. If they make enough of them then they can still figure out what's happening on your network. If you want a p2p network to w