BCMIX: A Dynamic Self-organizing Blockchain-based Mix Anonymous System
This work addresses privacy and security issues in anonymous communication systems, though it appears incremental as it builds on blockchain and mix-net concepts.
The authors tackled the problems of centralization, high resource requirements, and vulnerability to attacks in anonymous systems by proposing BCMIX, a dynamic self-organizing blockchain-based mix anonymous system, which demonstrated better resilience to attacks and achieved low latency without significant bandwidth or storage resources.
Increasing awareness of privacy-preserving has led to a strong focus on anonymous systems protecting anonymity. By studying early schemes, we summarize some intractable problems of anonymous systems. Centralization setting is a universal problem since most anonymous system rely on central proxies or presetting nodes to forward and mix messages, which compromises users' privacy in some way. Besides, availability becomes another important factor limiting the development of anonymous system due to the large requirement of additional additional resources (i.e. bandwidth and storage) and high latency. Moreover, existing anonymous systems may suffer from different attacks including abominable Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks, Distributed Denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and so on. In this context, we first come up with a BlockChain-based Mix-Net (BCMN) protocol and theoretically demonstrate its security and anonymity. Then we construct a concrete dynamic self-organizing BlockChain-based MIX anonymous system (BCMIX). In the system, users and mix nodes utilize the blockchain transactions and their addresses to negotiate keys with each other, which can resist the MitM attacks. In addition, we design an IP sharding algorithm to mitigate Sybil attacks. To evaluate the BCMIX system, we leverage the distribution of mining pools in the real world to test the system's performance and ability to resistant attacks. Compared with other systems, BCMIX provides better resilience to known attacks, while achieving low latency anonymous communication without significant bandwidth or storage resources.