Mix Network
Digital mixes (also known as mix networks) were invented by David Chaum in 1981. Digital mixes create hard-to-trace by using a chain of proxy servers. Each message is encrypted to each proxy using public key cryptography; the resulting encryption is layered like a Russian doll (except that each "doll" is of the same size) with the message as the innermost layer. Each proxy server strips off its own layer of encryption to reveal where to send the message next. If all but one of the proxy servers are compromised by the tracer, untraceability can still be achieved against some weaker adversaries.
Some anonymous remailers (such as Mixmaster) and onion routing (including Tor) are based on this idea.
There is another kind of mix net that consists of re-encryption operations. In these mixnets each mix node re-encrypts the set of received messages and the decryption is done in a single step. Homomorphic encryption schemes allow that.
Read more about Mix Network: How It Works, Goals, Further Reading
Famous quotes containing the words mix and/or network:
“Much of our reading, much of our labor, seems mere waiting: it was not that we were born for. Any other could do it as well or better. So little skill enters into these works, so little do they mix with the divine life, that it really signifies little what we do, whether we turn a grindstone, or ride, or run, or make fortune, or govern the state.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)