Note §
- This is a weekly update from the part of the team that didn’t attend the All-Hands Event in Athens.
Mixnet (Network Privacy) §
Research §
- Mixnet mixing problem: Based on the critique of the Loopix mixing design and proposed solutions, we have prepared an updated mixing design.
- We are going to prepare a Mixnet empirical analysis tool, so that we can make sure that our Mixnet design meets a proper level of anonymity that we expect. This will probably be based on our executable specification, so that anyone in the team can run it easily whenever they want. Based on it, our reference implementation (Rust) will expose similar metrics, so that we can monitor its behavior in the testnet (probably in collaboration with Vac). This will be useful for finding the Poisson problem mentioned in the previous weekly, for example.
- Network bootstrapping/node registration: started thinking through the problem of network bootstrapping and the requirement of node registration. Looking for inspiration, details of the very early discussion can be found in this WIP document.
- Optimization of mixnets: derived an upper bound on the probability that the fraction of compromised paths, α, is greater than some threshold 1α1. This new upper bound is non-asymptotic, i.e., for mixnets of any size n sampled from the population of N nodes, and much simpler to compute numerically than previously considered asymptotic bounds. Initial results of comparing this upper bound with simulations suggest that the bound is “practical”, i.e., can be much smaller than the trivial bound of 1, and can be used in optimization of mixnets. The summary of this work is provided in this document, and the detailed analysis can be found in the Overleaf document. Further simulations and work on the algorithm are currently in progress.