Spores: Stateless Predictive Onion Routing for E-Squads
It addresses the need for secure communication tools for journalists and whistle-blowers to circumvent global spying, though it appears incremental as it builds on onion routing with new concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of mass surveillance by proposing Spores, a decentralized file transfer protocol for journalists and whistle-blowers that enables anonymous file exchanges after physical meetings, leveraging personal devices in e-squads with competitive performance and improved privacy over existing onion routing.
Mass surveillance of the population by state agencies and corporate parties is now a well-known fact. Journalists and whistle-blowers still lack means to circumvent global spying for the sake of their investigations. With Spores, we propose a way for journalists and their sources to plan a posteriori file exchanges when they physically meet. We leverage on the multiplication of personal devices per capita to provide a lightweight, robust and fully anonymous decentralised file transfer protocol between users. Spores hinges on our novel concept of e-squads: one's personal devices, rendered intelligent by gossip communication protocols, can provide private and dependable services to their user. People's e-squads are federated into a novel onion routing network, able to withstand the inherent unreliability of personal appliances while providing reliable routing. Spores' performances are competitive, and its privacy properties of the communication outperform state of the art onion routing strategies.