Studying the anonymity trilemma with a discrete-event mix network simulator
This work addresses the need for tools to evaluate design choices in mix networks, which is important for researchers and developers in privacy-enhancing technologies, though it is incremental as it builds on existing concepts with a new simulator.
The authors tackled the problem of analyzing trade-offs between anonymity, latency, and bandwidth overhead in mix networks by developing a discrete-event simulator, and they demonstrated its capabilities through empirical analysis of deployed networks like Elixxir, HOPR, and Nym.
In this work, we present a discrete event mix network simulator, which allows analysing how anonymity, latency, and bandwidth overhead are affected by various scenarios of deployment and design choices. These design choices include network topology, mixing technique, volume of traffic, latency requirements, packet size or use of cover traffic. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first such simulator as work on it began in 2017 to analyze the Loopix mix network, and the code of our simulator is available under an open-source license. To demonstrate the capabilities of our simulator, we perform an empirical analysis of the impact of core design choices on anonymity, scalability and latency in Elixxir, HOPR and Nym, currently deployed mix network infrastructures that make a variety of different choices in their design.