[Cryptography] Sky Global Indictment, March 12, 2021

[jrzx]

On Monday, March 15, 2021 11:51 AM, Peter Fairbrother
> If I may quote Ross Anderson, Security Engineering ch25:
> The emerging pattern is that, thanks to network effects,
> one [network-limited] crypto phone system gets used ever
> more widely, until enough of its users are police
> targets and the authorities bust it.
>
> And it seems that the authorities don't much care
> whether the operator is doing something illegal or not,
> they will stop it

Obvious solution, an anonymizing system with no central
point of failure, a protocol, not an organization.

But though information wants to be free, programmers
want to be paid.  So do people who operate an
anonymization service.

Therefore needs to have a crypto coin funding it, also
facilitating the users paying each other.

Needs to be a social network that facilitates, among other
things, untraceable encrypted private rooms.

Suggested design of maximally private rooms:

A peer on the blockchain receives encrypted messages, each
with a single use elliptic point.  If the symmetric secret generated from the peer's durable secret scalar and tha
point matches the symmetric encryption secret, the peer
can decrypt.  If he cannot, silently discards it.

To establish a connection with which to send such messages,
the sender has to perform an adjustable proof of work, but
after one successful connection, sender durable key gets
white listed by receiver, and can subsequently send a lot
of messages.  Which messages are short and standard sized,
so messages longer than 160 bytes need to be fragmented
and subsequently re-assembled.

Each peer is a gateway for such messages to three or four
other peers.  If he can decrypt the message, he will find
inside a random time and random delay for resend.  He
sends the inner message to all the peers to which he is a gateway, only one of which will be able to decrypt it and
he does not know which one.

Rinse and repeat for three layers of encryption.  When you
successfully decrypt a message, you know how many layers
remain, because you know how much padding there was, and
how much padding you have to add to standardize the size.

The final innermost message is again encrypted to an
unknown recipient, but its size after the padding is
stripped off  indicates it is for the final recipient.

End users download all the messages, but only messages
to the real recipient can be decrypted, and the
recipient does not know which ones are his till he
downloads them.  You can also send public messages
that everyone can read, but no one can connect to
a real ip - the system functions as full social net.

A identity that can receive messages consists of
public key and a small set, typically three, peers
that the identity checks from time to time.

Peers are going to come under distributed denial of
service attack, so the service will have to be funded.
Needs a crypto coin, a lightning gateway system based
on [Anonymous Multi-Hop Locks for Blockchain Scalability
and Interoperability], which presupposes the
existence of an anonymizing layer, and the capacity to
create chaumian blinded coins that, when received by a
recipient that can decrypt them, will alter the balance
within a lightning gateway.

Each peer in the network has lightning gateways to the
three or four other peers with which he regularly
exchanges private and anonymized messages.  The payments
flow through through the system along the same paths as
the messages, leaking some limited information abou the relationship between entry and exit points, but a group
of small single message payments gets aggregated.

The lightning layer proposed in the above paper is
constructed in such a way that the party in the middle
of a chain or circle only knows the identity of his
immediate counterparties.

So, a client pays one side of gateway money in some
less private currency, and that peer gives the client
a pile of chaumian blinded secrets that can be used by
some entity known to the client, but not known to the peer issuing the blinded chaumian coints, to generate secrets
that are of value to the other side of the gateway, which
are then used to generate a lightning network transaction
so that the peer for whom the coin is addressed eventually receives payment.