mfahampshire
10 lines
1.4 KiB
Markdown
10 lines
1.4 KiB
Markdown
# Message Queue
|
|
|
|
One thing to remember is that clients, once connected to the Mixnet, **are always sending traffic into the Mixnet**; as well as the packets that you as a developer are sending from your application logic, they send [cover traffic](../../network/concepts/cover-traffic) at a constant rate defined by a Poisson process. This is part of the network's mitigation of timing attacks.
|
|
|
|
As such, you need to be careful to keep the process managing your clients alive / running, since when passing a message to a client (however you do it, either piping messages from an app to a standalone client or via one of the `send` functions exposed by the SDKs), you are **putting that message into the queue** to be source encrypted and sent in the future, in order to ensure that traffic leaving the client does so in a manner that to an external observer is uniform / does not create any 'burst' or change in traffic timings that could aid traffic analysis.
|
|
|
|
Accidentally dropping a client before your message has been sent is something that is possible and should be avoided (see the [troubleshooting guide](../rust/mixnet/troubleshooting) for more on this) but is easy to avoid simply by remembering to:
|
|
- keep your client process alive, even if you are not expecting a reply to your message
|
|
- (in the case of the SDKs) properly disconnecting your client in order to make sure that the message queue is flushed of Sphinx packets with actual payloads.
|