| This makes me curious. Is it possible to use homomorphic encryption to create a network of "dump pipes" for exchanging data? Tor is slow because data has to hop from peer to peer until it hits its destination. What if the "nodes" between you and the recipient ran on a single machine? Clients would simply send a homomorphically encrypted program to a central server which merely executed it. The programs and the data exchanged could be completely transparent, you could even give law enforcement access, and assuming: 1. the homomorphic encryption is secure 2. your data passes through enough trustworthy peers 3. there are enough nodes involved for plausible deniability ...it would not be possible to identify the path data takes as it is routed around. Or am I missing something? |
Traffic can be anonamised hopping it around many peers (assuming that a critical mass of them are not observed, which seems entirely likely these days).
If you sent a request to a single machine, which routed it between processes, eventually decoding the request, you are saying that the machine would not know what user made that request, and it could return the result via the same chain. But because both ends and the processing are observed, traffic analysis would yield which client asked for the file trivially. Rather like if the enemy controlled every node on your darknet, they could trivially know who you were and what you were doing.
The strength of the network is lots of nodes and lots of hops, in the hope that you will pass through enough uncontrolled ones that traffic can't be resolved. While what you suggest might, possibly reduce the risk from a compromised node in a multihop chain, it would not defeat traffic analysis, which is the major problem. Better just to inject fake traffic.