LARMix: Latency-Aware Routing in Mix Networks
Mahdi Rahimi
Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2024 · Day 1 · Tor and Mixed Networks
Anonymous communication systems, such as **mix networks**, are vital tools for preserving user privacy online. However, their core mechanism of reordering and delaying messages to achieve anonymity inherently introduces significant latency. While this latency is tolerable for delay-tolerant applications like email or cryptocurrency transactions, it severely degrades the user experience for mid-latency applications (e.g., instant messaging) and renders low-latency applications (e.g., web browsing) virtually unusable. This talk introduces **LARMix**, a novel latency-aware routing scheme designed to address this fundamental challenge: how to substantially reduce end-to-end latency in mixnets without fundamentally compromising the strong anonymity guarantees they provide.