Nikos Alexopoulos (TU Damstadt) and Thomas Zacharias  will present their joint work with PANORAMIX coordinator Aggelos Kiayias and Riivo Talviste (Cyberentica AS) titled “MCMix: Anonymous Messaging via Secure Multiparty Computation”  at the USENIX Security conference that will be held on 16-18 August 2017, Vancouver, Canada.

Abstract: We present ‘MCMix’, an anonymous messaging system that completely hides communication metadata and can scale in the order of hundreds of thousands of users. Our approach is to isolate two suitable functionalities, called dialing and conversation, that when used in succession realize anonymous messaging. With this as a starting point, we apply secure multiparty computation (“MC” or MPC) and proceed to realize them. We present an implementation using a prevalent MPC system (Sharemind) that is competitive in terms of latency with previous messaging systems that only offer much weaker privacy guarantees. Our solution can be instantiated in a variety of different ways with different MPC implementations, overall illustrating how MPC is a viable and competitive alternative to mix-nets and DC-nets for anonymous communication.