Stanford Researchers to Tackle Bitmessage with Anonymous Graph Routing

[cypherpunk at danwin1210.me]

https://www.reddit.com/r/bitmessage/comments/co8e64/anyone_interested_in_building_a_scalable/

Anyone interested in building a scalable, graph-based anonymous routing
feature with us?

Hello BitMessage community,

We are researchers from Stanford University and we are working on
designing private and resource-efficient routing protocols. We are
reaching out to you to collaborate and implement a new feature of highly
scalable, graph-based anonymous routing algorithm.

The idea is simple. The current BitMessage protocol ensures recipient
anonymity by sending the same message to all nodes in the network.
However, as the network size grows, this approach would be difficult to
scale. First, sending the message to all nodes would cause high
communication traffic overhead that grows with network size. Second, nodes
in the network may be connected by a sparse and non-complete physical
communication network (eg. think two geographically distant nodes).

To address these issues, we propose to build a routing protocol that sends
redundant messages only to a set of neighbors of the intended recipient
instead of the entire network, where neighborhoods are defined with
respect to some communication graph. However, the neighborhood is
carefully sampled with a strong information-theoretic guarantee: an
adversary who knows the graph AND sees the neighborhood wouldn't be able
to infer which node therein is the true recipient. We have already done
some preliminary work on this front, but would love to work with the
community to see these ideas manifest in a high-impact real-world
protocol.

The core idea of the proposed project is based on the segment-based
algorithm in Definition 3 of [1]. We will be happy to discuss more details
should you be interested.

If this is of interest, please reach out to us at mserturk at stanford.edu.

Thank you!

[1] Tsitsiklis, John N., and Kuang Xu. "Delay-predictability trade-offs in
reaching a secret goal." Operations Research 66.2 (2018): 587-596.
http://web.mit.edu/~jnt/www/Papers/J163-18-kx-secret-goal.pdf