Reading (For Dummies)

Blogging the talks

I'm sitting at the Privacy Enhancing Technology workshop. This morning there were three papers presented on Mix networks, hiding communication by scattering the routing. It's tricker than it sounds, because you have to set up a big network of mixed routes, and be mathematically sure that an untrusted node in the mix won't affect things too much, be sure that the message gets to where it's going, and try to make the network not pass too many messages (flooding the network).

Some of this stuff is damn cool. Under "neutral traffic" (the case where everyone in a n-node network is sending 1 message to everyone else), you get an explosion of possible messaging sequences. In a 3-node network, assuming you can observe messages being passed between the nodes, there are 115 possible communications that might be happening, all with equal probability.

And the paranoid rejoice, because they see that it is good.