mfahampshire
1.4 KiB
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 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 example TODO LINK 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.