The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab presents 

Anonymity in practice: xx network

Richard T. Carback III

12–1pm EDT Oct. 4, 2024 via WebEx

Much of our lives are digitized and recorded by centralized entities. The economic incentives to exploit these data and the massive data breaches facilitated by centralization, continue to result in privacy violations of unprecedented scale. To protect consumers, some platforms promise end-to-end encryption to limit access to message content, but most of the value comes from metadata—the who, what, when, where, and how details of any message or activity.

Anonymity systems promise greater protection for these metadata, but few exist in production and their user bases are small. In this talk, we discuss xx network’s privacy-protecting communication layer that is powered by a decentralized implementation of cMix, a mixnet protocol for anonymous communications. This platform was deployed almost three years ago and features over 370 nodes performing continuous mix operations at scale. We will provide an overview of the architecture of the platform, how it differs from the original cMix paper, the challenges involved, and a walkthrough of the entire xx development kit (xxDK) stack, including a live demonstration.

Dr. Richard Carback is a cryptographer and digital privacy advocate. He is a co-founder of the xx network, a blockchain project focused around mix network-based messaging with post-quantum signature capabilities. Richard is a UMBC Alumnus (CS PhD, 2010) in cryptography and computer security who has built a SaaS CVE scanner, novel crypto messaging platforms, election systems, and embedded security tools. In his previous role, Dr. Carback cofounded Lexumo, which spun out of the embedded systems security group he led at Charles Stark Draper Laboratories. At UMBC’s Center for Information Security and Assurance, he worked with Alan Sherman on Scantegrity, a practical end-to-end voter verifiable election system.

Host: Alan T. Sherman. Support for this event was provided in part by NSF by SFS grant DGE-1753681. The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab meets biweekly Fridays 12-1pm.All meetings are open to the public. Upcoming: 10/18, Vandana Janeja (IS, UMBC), Deep Fakes; 11/1 [1-2pm], Keke Chen (CSEE, UMBC), Privacy scoring for machine learning; 11/15, Houbing Song (IS, UMBC); 12/6, Zhiuan Chen (IS, UMBC), Privacy.