[00:00.000 --> 00:12.000]  So, the next presentation is a NIM mixed net from Yoon Hockblatt.
[00:12.000 --> 00:14.000]  So, welcome.
[00:14.000 --> 00:16.000]  Yeah, thank you very much.
[00:16.000 --> 00:18.000]  Right.
[00:18.000 --> 00:20.000]  It's great to be here.
[00:20.000 --> 00:23.000]  And the presentation all seems to be working.
[00:23.000 --> 00:27.000]  Right, so I'll talk about NIM.
[00:27.000 --> 00:33.000]  The title is Intro to a New Anonymous Communication Network.
[00:33.000 --> 00:39.000]  There's quite a lot of overlap in the previous presentation about the concepts involved.
[00:39.000 --> 00:42.000]  And who am I?
[00:42.000 --> 00:47.000]  My name is Yoon Hockblatt, or sometimes I go by John for simplicity.
[00:47.000 --> 00:49.000]  I'm a Swedish developer.
[00:49.000 --> 00:54.000]  I spend my days writing rusts, back-end type of things.
[00:54.000 --> 00:58.000]  I do C++ and scientific computing in a previous life.
[00:58.000 --> 01:00.000]  Yeah, living Stockholm.
[01:00.000 --> 01:02.000]  Yeah, that's me.
[01:02.000 --> 01:07.000]  Right, so the NIM mixed net.
[01:07.000 --> 01:08.000]  What's the NIM mixed net?
[01:08.000 --> 01:09.000]  So, basics.
[01:09.000 --> 01:11.000]  I mean, this is obviously free software.
[01:11.000 --> 01:14.000]  The source code is available on GitHub over there.
[01:14.000 --> 01:16.000]  It's Apache licensed.
[01:16.000 --> 01:18.000]  It's mostly written in Rust.
[01:18.000 --> 01:20.000]  All the back-end stuff is written in Rust.
[01:20.000 --> 01:22.000]  Some of the front-end things is TypeScript.
[01:22.000 --> 01:24.000]  This was in the past.
[01:24.000 --> 01:29.000]  This has been funded by some EU projects.
[01:29.000 --> 01:32.000]  And currently, there is a Switzerland-based startup
[01:32.000 --> 01:35.000]  with us, the majority of the development.
[01:35.000 --> 01:37.000]  But yeah, it's an open project.
[01:37.000 --> 01:40.000]  And of course, we welcome public contributions.
[01:40.000 --> 01:46.000]  And yeah, it's quite deeply rooted in university as well, in university research.
[01:46.000 --> 01:51.000]  We have some, you know, work-loss researchers associated with the project.
[01:51.000 --> 01:55.000]  So, you know, the concepts aren't things that we sort of, you know, came up ourselves.
[01:55.000 --> 02:00.000]  This is, you know, state-of-the-art research.
[02:00.000 --> 02:03.000]  Right, so what is the problem that we're trying to solve?
[02:03.000 --> 02:07.000]  You know, we had the usual suspects, the, you know, government surveillance
[02:07.000 --> 02:09.000]  and surveillance capitalism.
[02:09.000 --> 02:14.000]  And, you know, if these four, which of these two is a problem, you know,
[02:14.000 --> 02:17.000]  very much depends on where in the world you are.
[02:17.000 --> 02:20.000]  In some parts of the world, these things aren't that big of a concern.
[02:20.000 --> 02:22.000]  For other people, this is serious matter.
[02:22.000 --> 02:29.000]  This is, you know, of grave concern to some people, depending on who you are and where you live.
[02:29.000 --> 02:32.000]  And what is the aspect that we try to tackle here?
[02:32.000 --> 02:40.000]  Because there's a lot of privacy platforms that sort of, to sort of, to try to attack this challenge
[02:40.000 --> 02:42.000]  from different perspectives.
[02:42.000 --> 02:47.000]  The NMEXnet is a network layer, or it's a transport layer thing.
[02:47.000 --> 02:53.000]  And the main challenge to be focused on is that it has become clear in the sort of the last ten years
[02:53.000 --> 02:59.000]  that there's now so much surveillance going on, and there are some entities that collect so much data
[02:59.000 --> 03:03.000]  on a global scale that they almost get some sort of like a god-sized view of the network.
[03:03.000 --> 03:08.000]  They can monitor the network on a planet scale, and they can do, they can correlate,
[03:08.000 --> 03:14.000]  they can correlate using leaked metadata, your transmission patterns, your packet sizes, timings.
[03:14.000 --> 03:22.000]  They can do end-to-end correlations, even though like your data is sent entirely encrypted the whole way,
[03:22.000 --> 03:28.000]  or obfuscated, but still, if you can sort of monitor like all endpoints,
[03:28.000 --> 03:33.000]  you can sort of still draw conclusions, you can identify who talks to who.
[03:33.000 --> 03:39.000]  And you know, as we know, who talks to who is sometimes more important than what they say from a sort of surveillance perspective.
[03:39.000 --> 03:45.000]  So that's the sort of the angle, the challenge that we try to talk about this.
[03:45.000 --> 03:52.000]  And so now I'm sort of taking a step back here, so I'm referring to the NIM platform,
[03:52.000 --> 03:59.000]  which is, then I use this quote here, a decentralized, incentivized mixed-net plus prior credentials.
[03:59.000 --> 04:04.000]  And sort of, yeah, my talk here will be to try to unpack what all of this means,
[04:04.000 --> 04:11.000]  and we're going to start then with what I think is sort of the core part is the mixed-net, the word in the middle there.
[04:11.000 --> 04:21.000]  I think if you use something like Tor as a starting point, that's sort of a very good first step to understand what it is.
[04:21.000 --> 04:26.000]  And just like Tor and just like the previous talk, it's an overlay network,
[04:26.000 --> 04:36.000]  in the same way as I2P uses onion routing, where all packets are wrapped in layers of encryption to sort of hide the fact,
[04:36.000 --> 04:40.000]  to hide the end destination of each packet.
[04:40.000 --> 04:46.000]  It's based on the Loupix design, if you know a little bit about mixed-nets, you've probably heard about Loupix.
[04:46.000 --> 04:54.000]  I put in a few citations here at the bottom, if you want to read a bit more about these things.
[04:54.000 --> 05:04.000]  It uses Sphinx packets, so that the idea is that all packets are wrapped into these identically looking and identically behaving packets,
[05:04.000 --> 05:10.000]  to sort of to hide some sizes and timings.
[05:10.000 --> 05:18.000]  And also, each packet as it moves through, because mixed-net is, I mean, okay, so something I forgot to mention,
[05:18.000 --> 05:25.000]  mixed-net is very much what it sounds. It's data, you send through data, multiple hops, you mix data as much as you can,
[05:25.000 --> 05:28.000]  through a cloud of nodes.
[05:28.000 --> 05:33.000]  At each node, I'm going to have some pictures on the next slide to illustrate it better.
[05:33.000 --> 05:41.000]  But yeah, on each hop in the network, you add things like random timings, which affect the reorders traffic,
[05:41.000 --> 05:49.000]  you add cover traffic, which cover traffic can appear in many ways, either between nodes,
[05:49.000 --> 05:59.000]  but also, for example, if you use a client to connect to network, to transmit data, you emit Sphinx packets at a steady average rate,
[05:59.000 --> 06:05.000]  so it's not a steady rate, but it's probabilistic how you send the packets.
[06:05.000 --> 06:11.000]  But you send the steady stream of packets, either fake or real ones, so when you have real data to send,
[06:11.000 --> 06:16.000]  you just fill up the packet stream, the packets they send out, fill up with real data.
[06:16.000 --> 06:22.000]  So from the outside, you can't tell when you're actually sending, when you're bursting data.
[06:22.000 --> 06:29.000]  You attach SERBs, so single-use reply blocks in your packets, so that when you, if you make a request across the network
[06:29.000 --> 06:37.000]  to get something back, you attach these headers, these metadata, so that the response can be layer encrypted and sent back,
[06:37.000 --> 06:46.000]  so that on the other side, the server doesn't know where the destination is, so you hide your identity,
[06:46.000 --> 06:53.000]  but you still allow the other side to reply back to you.
[06:53.000 --> 07:00.000]  It's a picture, the first step, the first one there, ordinary VPN, and a VPN doesn't give you any anonymity,
[07:00.000 --> 07:07.000]  it just moves trust, so the guy in the middle there, you can still see where data is coming from, where it is going.
[07:07.000 --> 07:12.000]  The second one, you have things like Tor, where you have these nodes in the middle, where you open up a circuit
[07:12.000 --> 07:17.000]  through the swarm of nodes, and you pump data through.
[07:17.000 --> 07:25.000]  And here you have mixed-net setup, where in each packet is mixed individually, so you don't open up a circuit,
[07:25.000 --> 07:29.000]  like Tor, for example, you send up, each packet is sent as an individual pass-through.
[07:29.000 --> 07:36.000]  And the idea here, the crucial thing is that on the other side, you see these packets there, they are now,
[07:36.000 --> 07:41.000]  they're colored white now instead of red, and they're the same size, and you shouldn't be able to tell,
[07:41.000 --> 07:48.000]  you can't tell, you can't correlate the data on the other side compared to on the sender side,
[07:48.000 --> 07:57.000]  which you can in many other systems, because you can't correlate transmission patterns, timing sizes.
[07:57.000 --> 08:05.000]  So even if you can monitor all the data, all the exit data from this mixed-net cloud,
[08:05.000 --> 08:16.000]  you still can't correlate who talks to who. That's sort of the key thing here.
[08:16.000 --> 08:22.000]  And yeah, so if we go back then to this quote, so decentralized, incentivized mixed-net plus price credentials,
[08:22.000 --> 08:31.000]  what we mean by incentivized, we mean that the network directory, which keeps track of all the mixed-nodes
[08:31.000 --> 08:39.000]  and gateways are a bit like exit nodes in Tor, they are constantly being monitored.
[08:39.000 --> 08:43.000]  So the network directory is effectively a set of validators running a consensus protocol,
[08:43.000 --> 08:50.000]  and they keep track of all the mixed-nodes, how well they mix traffic, how well they contribute capacity to network,
[08:50.000 --> 08:58.000]  giving them limbs for it, which in turn can be turned around and used to acquire bandwidth credentials,
[08:58.000 --> 09:03.000]  coconut credentials, it's the academic term.
[09:03.000 --> 09:08.000]  And the idea is that we also, because this is always a problem when you have something like this,
[09:08.000 --> 09:14.000]  with volunteers you only get so far, anonymity or privacy, it loves company, you want to disappear in the crowd,
[09:14.000 --> 09:20.000]  so you want to encourage people to provide capacity to the network at the same time as they're using it, that's the idea.
[09:20.000 --> 09:26.000]  Because otherwise it becomes difficult to scale up above a sort of base level.
[09:26.000 --> 09:33.000]  But if you want to make this available for the broader public, you need more capacity.
[09:33.000 --> 09:38.000]  And this is a way that we hope we can achieve this.
[09:38.000 --> 09:48.000]  And these private credentials, the idea is that you break the linkability between your identity and your right to use the service.
[09:48.000 --> 09:56.000]  And there's a very deep topic on its own, there's a citation, there are some cryptographic buzzwords here,
[09:56.000 --> 10:02.000]  as well as that are re-randomizable, means that if you use the same bandwidth credential multiple times,
[10:02.000 --> 10:13.000]  it's indistinguishable from multiple people using different credentials from the person redeeming these.
[10:13.000 --> 10:23.000]  But yeah, the idea is you want to break the link between your identity and your right to use something.
[10:23.000 --> 10:31.000]  And yeah, okay, so the first word there, decentralized, it's not too much to add there,
[10:31.000 --> 10:39.000]  we have a running network, it's 500 mix-nodes currently, and yeah, the vision is that this becomes self-running,
[10:39.000 --> 10:49.000]  it shouldn't have an antifragile funding model, we don't want it to be reliant on a specific company
[10:49.000 --> 10:56.000]  or some funding body or donations or anything, we want this to have robust,
[10:56.000 --> 11:05.000]  robustly running on its own, run by the community entirely, long-term, that's sort of the vision here.
[11:05.000 --> 11:09.000]  Even though currently we have a startup that sort of does the most of the development,
[11:09.000 --> 11:19.000]  in long-term we should be able to hand this off as sort of the idea.
[11:19.000 --> 11:26.000]  There's a picture, so this is all running currently, this thing that is currently sort of in deployment
[11:26.000 --> 11:31.000]  or sort of being rolled out or these credentials currently is free to use the main network,
[11:31.000 --> 11:37.000]  we have all these clients, there's SoxFi clients, there's Awasom clients,
[11:37.000 --> 11:44.000]  there's a native running client exposing a web socket, the mix-nodes up there,
[11:44.000 --> 11:50.000]  when you use a user you connect to the gateway, which is like entry and exit nodes for a tour,
[11:50.000 --> 11:56.000]  you mix the traffic, you exit on the gateway, you can have service providers,
[11:56.000 --> 12:06.000]  there's the set of validators keeping track of all the nodes in the system.
[12:06.000 --> 12:11.000]  Yeah, there's a lot to take in here, probably a lot of details there,
[12:11.000 --> 12:16.000]  I'm not sure it's all visible towards the end, but yeah, that's pretty much it.
[12:16.000 --> 12:17.000]  Thank you for your time.
[12:17.000 --> 12:27.000]  Yeah, thank you a lot for a nice talk.
[12:27.000 --> 12:32.000]  Yeah, thank you for listening, and I think that we have some time,
[12:32.000 --> 12:38.000]  so theoretically we could spend it asking a question at least for two minutes here
[12:38.000 --> 12:43.000]  and then after it we can discuss it outside.
[12:43.000 --> 12:53.000]  Hi, can you imagine the NIM framework also to be integrated into another proof-of-stake-based cryptocurrency
[12:53.000 --> 12:56.000]  as a back-end in the future maybe?
[12:56.000 --> 12:57.000]  What did he say first?
[12:57.000 --> 13:03.000]  Can you imagine that the main part of the NIM framework like the mix-nodes and everything around it
[13:03.000 --> 13:07.000]  can also be attached to an existing proof-of-stake-based other cryptocurrency
[13:07.000 --> 13:10.000]  that is not currently part of your ecosystem?
[13:10.000 --> 13:21.000]  Well, a big use case of this is that this is sort of on the network layer,
[13:21.000 --> 13:24.000]  so that means it's a big use case.
[13:24.000 --> 13:28.000]  You have all these other private systems where in this crypto space
[13:28.000 --> 13:31.000]  where they have these privacy-preserving services,
[13:31.000 --> 13:33.000]  but they still leak metadata at the bottom layer.
[13:33.000 --> 13:37.000]  They still leak metadata when you use broadcast transactions and things like this.
[13:37.000 --> 13:42.000]  So I think to integrate this in other systems in this space,
[13:42.000 --> 13:48.000]  then it will be in that layer, sort of the transport layer.
[13:48.000 --> 13:53.000]  So yes, there's a lot of potential for integrating with other privacy platforms, I think.
[13:53.000 --> 13:57.000]  In general, there are a lot of privacy platforms,
[13:57.000 --> 14:00.000]  and I think what we need is a robust ecosystem.
[14:00.000 --> 14:03.000]  There is no single solution that solves all our problems.
[14:03.000 --> 14:07.000]  We need a robust ecosystem for different solutions for different types of problems
[14:07.000 --> 14:09.000]  or different categories of problems.
[14:09.000 --> 14:12.000]  I mean, I don't see this as a competitor to other systems.
[14:12.000 --> 14:14.000]  It's more of a complement to each other.
[14:14.000 --> 14:19.000]  For example, when you add random delays, for example,
[14:19.000 --> 14:24.000]  that of course means you sort of compromise, you give up a bit of latency,
[14:24.000 --> 14:28.000]  which works very well for asynchronous communication,
[14:28.000 --> 14:33.000]  but might not work so well for other categories of applications.
[14:33.000 --> 14:36.000]  So I think something like this is also the complement store.
[14:36.000 --> 14:39.000]  It doesn't replace the store. It sort of complements it.
[14:39.000 --> 14:42.000]  Yeah.
[14:42.000 --> 14:44.000]  Okay. Thank you again, Yun.
[14:44.000 --> 14:46.000]  If there's any more questions, just grab me afterwards.
[14:46.000 --> 14:59.000]  Just go there and ask questions.