Abstract

Applying cryptographic operations in a distributed and collaborative fashion has been for more than four decades a dominant paradigm in the design of privacy-preserving communications systems and specifically mix-nets. The design of such systems present to the end user a guarantee that typically involves a threshold condition. For instance, such condition could have the form “as long as x out of a certain set of y cryptographic keys remain uncompromised then privacy is maintained.” Enforcing the condition is typically out of scope for the system design and the end-user has no tools whatsoever to assess whether the condition holds. As a result, it is typically taken at face value. This is unfortunate as it may lead to deployments where privacy fails – and to make matters worse, no-one may even be aware of it.

In this talk, I will present ongoing work (in collaboration with Claudia Diaz and Harry Halpin) that is pursued in the context of Nym (https://nymtech.net/), an incentivised mix-network system. The design is based on new techniques in the context of mix-nets as well as it suitably adapts concepts first developed in the context of blockchain protocols, and offers an incentive-driven privacy preserving communication infrastructure that aims to provide privacy via a novel “cryptoeconomic” mechanism.

RECORDING : Please note, this event will be recorded and will be available after the event for an indeterminate period under a CC BY -NC-ND license. Audience members should bear this in mind before joining the webinar or asking questions.