LARMix: Latency Aware Routing in Mixnets

Mahdi Rahimi, Piyush Kumar Sharma

Abstract:

Anonymous communication systems such as mix
networks achieve anonymity at the expense of latency that is
introduced to alter the flow of packets and hinder their tracing.
A high latency however has a negative impact on usability. In this
work, we propose LARMix, a novel latency-aware routing scheme
for mixnets that reduces propagation latency with a limited
impact on anonymity. LARMix can achieve this while also load
balancing the traffic in the network. We additionally show how a
network can be configured to maximize anonymity while meeting
an average end-to-end latency constraint. Lastly, we perform
a security analysis studying various adversarial strategies and
conclude that LARMix does not significantly increase adversarial
advantage as long as the adversary is not able to selectively
compromise mixnodes after the LARMix routing policy has been
computed.