Nym censorship resistance update

Why Nym plans to make its mixnet and dVPN globally usable and censorship resistant.

Author: Nym

October 12, 20234 mins read

Why Nym plans to make its mixnet and dVPN globally usable and censorship resistant.

Censorship resistance means building technologies that circumvent the filtered internet.

Languages: Française // Русский // Español // Português // Bahasa Indonesia // 中文 // Türkçe

The first step for building censorship resistance into Nym is to monitor the current state of censorship of the Nym mixnet. That way, the core team can determine exactly if the mixnet is already being censored, and if so, exactly how, so that this censorship can be circumvented.

Why is censorship resistance important? It puts access to information, knowledge and choice back into the hands of people rather than being subject to the overreaching impositions placed on them by governments.

The path to censorship resistance

To achieve this, the R&D team has created a mixnet censorship test based on the Open Observatory of Network Interference probe.

Anyone can run the test. Please do! A tutorial is available here.

Nym is seeking input from as many geographies as possible. Please share your report.jsonl file with Nym via email or in the General channel of the Nym Matrix server, and be sure to indicate which country the measurement was taken in.

Right now, the results show no indication of censorship, however this doesn’t mean there won’t be any censorship in future.

In fact, as mixnet usage picks up and the Nym VPN launches in Beta by the end of 2023 it is highly likely that it will begin to face some censorship...

The Nym mixnet is unique in that it protects metadata. To do this, content is split up, encrypted, and mixed in with fake cover traffic, all of which is sent at random intervals to make tracking the original message impossible.

However, because all the packets are the same size, it’s possible that the mixing mechanism is identifiable.

To be more resistant, the mixnet needs not just cover traffic, but also to disguise mixnet packets so they appear just like regular communications traffic to observers. And it is exactly this work that the R&D team is exploring right now.

Nym is already exploring technologies such as pluggable transports, which are currently used as a kind of proxy in the Tor network to disguise connections, and Shadowsocks, an open source protocol that helps users bypass firewalls by connecting to a third-party SOCKS5 proxy.

As the Tor Project explains, internet providers can block connections to known Tor relays and then analyse network traffic to deanonymise use of the protocol. To get around this problem, Tor runs something called Bridges — secret Tor relays that don’t appear in any public list so censors can’t discover them to block in the first place. This is where pluggable transports come in. Pluggable transports disguise connections to the bridges, distorting traffic so that it looks completely normal to any observers.

The Nym mixnet works differently to Tor but the purpose of pluggable transports would be the same: to cloak data so that observers wouldn’t even know they were looking at mixnet traffic. All the signifiers would suggest regular HTTP internet traffic but beneath this cover would be Sphinx-encrypted mixnet packets.

Shadowsocks, meanwhile, is an open source split proxy technology loosely based on SOCKS5. It is widely used in China, where VPN traffic is blocked, to disguise internet traffic and evade censorship. However, it is not a privacy-preserving technology: its main use is to bypass censorship.

The core team will explore a wide range of technologies with the ultimate goal of providing as many options to resist censorship as possible.

The R&D team is planning deeper exploratory work on censorship resistance to commence later this year, while development and implementation is penned in on the Nym roadmap for the second half of 2024.

The goal is that the mixnet will not only provide unparalleled privacy, but that adversaries won’t be able to identify mixnet traffic at all — with all communications disguised, a step towards an open access but private and secure, unblockable internet.