Katzenpost on EchoMix

Monthly News Update (May 2019)

Sat, 04 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Greetings,

The last few weeks have been very busy. I now have the basic working prototype implementation of a new Katzenpost messaging system. This new system has mutual location hiding properties for communication partners because recipients retreive their messages from a remote spool using a Sphinx SURB based protocol. SPHINX SPHINXSPEC

Monthly News Update (April 2019)

Wed, 10 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Greetings,

The Panoramix grant project funded by the European Commission has officially ended but the Katzenpost free software project lives on. Masala and I continue to work on Katzenpost for grant money given to us by Samsung.

We recently learned a few things about mixnet design in a series of design meetings. The conclusions from our learnings is too much information and detail for this here post. However I will summarize some of our conclusions below. Our discussions usually revolved around mixnet CRDT applications, client reliability, message spool server design, client decoy traffic and, preventing attacks: statistical disclosure and active confirmation attacks.

Rustification

Sun, 13 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Hi,

I wrote some notes about making mixnet components in Rust that are binary compatible with existing Katzenpost components

Rustification

The goal should be binary compatibility with the golang implementation of Katzenpost such that the existing golang components can interoperate with the new Rust components. Perhaps the biggest advantage of using Rust would be for writing mixnet clients as opposed to mix servers. A Rust mixnet client could easily present a FFI that could be used by user interfaces written in Java for Android and Swift for iOS.

Monthly News Update (Nov 2018)

Thu, 22 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Greetings!

This is our second edition of katzenpost news. There’s been a lot of progress since the last report I posted many months ago.

Firstly I’d like to mention our future development plans:

mix and directory authority key agility
generative testing for the voting Directory Authority system
generative testing for all of the things where appropriate
load and performance testing the mix server
design and development of an application agnostic mixnet client message oriented protocol library
design and development of one or more applications that use our new mixnet protocol client library
potentially assist in integration with other software projects that want to use a mixnet transport protocol

Our recent accomplishments include:

Monthly News Update (Feb 2018)

Tue, 27 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

katzenpost monthly news

Greetings!

This is our first edition of katzenpost monthly news. I’ll be summarizing recent events from our first hackfest in Athens in early December 2017 to the present.

What we did in Athens:

setup a test mix network
remote collaboration with Yawning Angel to fix bugs and add features to the server side
wrote some basic installation documentation
Moritz created and deployed the katzenpost website with glossary and FAQ
explored technical issues related to python and java language bindings to golang libraries
discussed at length the possibilies for various kinds of mixnet clients
Vincent wrote a prototype android instant messenger client
met with the GrNet people and told them how to install a katzenpost mix network and answered their questions
meskio and kaliy added an external user db interface for Provider authentication
meskio wrote prototype python clients for testing purposes
we had many group discussion about mix network design
special guest visitor: George Kadianakis from Tor Project

Since that time we have been working on our PKI specification. Nick Mathewson sent us a six page review of our spec and Yawning sent a two page reply; both of these e-mails contain lots of design details and have been useful in our editing of the spec thus far: