Precomputed and transactional mixing

Abstract

Precomputed and transactional mixing is believed to allow portable devices, such as smart phones, to send and receive messages, with little extra bandwidth or battery usage, while achieving anonymity for senders and recipients among all messages sent globally in batches defined by short time intervals. To learn anything about which inputs correspond with which outputs of such a batch of messages, the entire cascade of mix devices, each preferably operating independently in a different country, would it is believed have to be compromised. None of the real-time computation, neither by the mixes nor smartphones, uses full public-key operations—resulting it is believed in orders of magnitude performance improvement over previously-known systems. Aspects include untraceable return addresses, group chat, feed-following and large payloads. Transaction protocols include a variety of payments use cases. Limited anonymity and credential mechanism are based on a new approach to user identification disclosed, in which each user provides a small amount of different identifying information to each mix node, so that comparatively little is revealed to each node individually.