mfahampshire
1.1 KiB
Introduction
Nym's network documentation covering network architecture, node types, tokenomics, and crypto systems.
Technical Motivations for Nym
When you send data across the internet, it can be recorded by a wide range of observers: your ISP, internet infrastructure providers, large tech companies, and governments.
Even if the content of a network request is encrypted, observers can still see that data was transmitted, its size, frequency of transmission, and gather metadata from unencrypted parts of the data (such as IP routing information). Adversaries may then combine all the leaked information to probabilistically de-anonymize users.
The Nym mixnet provides very strong security guarantees against this sort of surveillance. It packetises and mixes together IP traffic from many users inside the mixnet.
If you're into comparisons, the Nym mixnet is conceptually similar to other systems such as Tor, but provides improved protections against end-to-end timing attacks which can de-anonymize users. When Tor was first fielded, in 2002, those kinds of attacks were regarded as science fiction. But the future is now here.