The Nym network ("Nym") is a decentralized and incentivized infrastructure to provision
privacy to a broad range of message-based applications and services.
The core component of Nym is
a mixnet that protects network traffic metadata for applications, providing communication privacy superior to both VPNs and Tor against global adversaries that can watch the entire internet. Nodes in the
mixnet are rewarded via a novel proof of mixing scheme that proves that mix nodes are providing a high
quality of service. Rewards given by NYM tokens allow anyone to join the Nym network and enable a
sustainable economic model for privacy.
NYM tokens can be transformed into anonymous credentials
that allow users to privately prove their "right to use" services in a decentralized and verifiable manner. The Nym network can serve as the foundation for a vast range of privacy-enhanced applications
that defend the fundamental freedoms of people across the globe against traffic analysis by powerful
adversaries.
1 Introduction
The current lack of privacy on the internet exposes billions of people to mass surveillance and data breaches,
undermining trust in digital services and stifling innovation. Thanks to the failure of governments to ban
strong encryption during the original "crypto wars" of the 1990s, open source libraries like OpenSSL
created an opening for new services like Paypal, Amazon, and eBay to emerge – which would have been
impossible without the end-to-end encryption between browsers and websites needed to secure financial
transactions.
Today is eerily similar: privacy is undermined by pervasive data collection and centralized
monopolies, preventing innovative services and platforms from arising. Yet the tide is turning due to popular discontent against mass surveillance and the new possibilities opened by Bitcoin for creating incentive
mechanisms that enable a network to cooperate and self-sustain.
Inspired by this, Nym puts forward new
foundational standards and open-source libraries for privacy that can enable previously inconceivable applications and markets. Nym is a permissionless and incentivized network designed to defend user privacy,
even against corporations and government actors with the capacity to capture all global internet traffic. The
Nym network provides a scalable privacy infrastructure to support third-party applications and services in
offering private access features to their users.
2. Network-level surveillance
The internet as we know it was not designed for privacy. Cryptography was bolted on as an afterthought
to protocols such as those used for instant messaging and web browsing, which otherwise expose data in
plaintext to anyone who can eavesdrop on communications.
Today, widely deployed secure web browsing
and messaging protocols like TLS and Signal implement end-to-end encryption to protect the content of
communications. However, even if data payloads are encrypted, these protocols still expose metadata to
network eavesdroppers, including information such as who communicates with whom, when, how much,
how often, for how long.
* Existing solutions for network privacy
-VPNs
The most widely used means of improving network-level privacy are VPNs (Virtual Private Net-
works). VPNs build an encrypted tunnel between a user’s client device and a centralized server run by a
VPN provider, which acts as proxy that forwards the client’s communications.
VPNs are often misconfig-ured in ways that compromise security and even when configured correctly, VPNs are trivial to
monitor and censor by adversaries with just local network access at the VPN server. Such network adver-
saries can correlate traffic in and out of the VPN server to reveal the identity and destination of the VPN
user, as well as block the VPN from being accessible.
These designs successfully decentralize the single point of trust in the VPN provider to multiple
VPN providers, but can still easily be deanonymized by network adversaries that watch the dVPN entry
and exit points to correlate traffic; consequently, they do not offer the level of privacy needed for high-value
applications. Nym can complement rather than compete with decentralized VPN providers, as a dVPN can
provide entry points to the Nym mixnet for users who want to conceal towards their local network the fact
that they are using Nym. At the same time, Nym adds a layer of privacy to dVPNs that the VPN technology
does not offer by itself.
- Peer-to-peer networks. The “Invisible Internet Project” (I2P) is a peer-to-peer alternative to Tor, mean-
ing that in I2P, all participants simultaneously serve both as clients that originate communications and as
proxy routers that relay communications for others . In a similar manner to Tor clients, I2P clients build
multi-hop connections where data is layer-encrypted once per hop in the route.
- Mixnets
A mix network, or mixnet, is an overlay network of mix nodes that routes messages anonymously.
Similarly to Tor, each packet relayed via a mixnet is encrypted multiple times and sent through a se-
quence of nodes, each of which removes a layer of encryption, until the last mix node sends the message
to its final destination.
*Economic incentives and scalability
Despite increased public awareness and interest in privacy over the last years, no system has yet successfully
taken advantage of cryptocurrency-based incentives to create an economically sustainable network that
provides privacy against powerful network adversaries at scale. At the same time, blockchains that feature
incentives still depend on peer-to-peer broadcast networks that often provide little to no privacy, and in
the best case protect only against weak adversaries who lack the ability to observe a large portion of the
peer-to-peer network.
3.The Nym Network Design
Nym is designed to support privacy-enhanced access to applications and services, both in terms of protecting
communications metadata and privately proving the "right to use" services. Nym leverages token-based
incentives to fund operational costs, dynamically scale to meet user demand for privacy, and reward nodes
for contributing to the protocols with a high quality of service.
Get connected with us 👇
Discord // Telegram // Element // Twitter
