Spores: Stateless Predictive Onion Routing for E-Squads

TL;DR

Spores introduces a decentralized, anonymous file transfer protocol leveraging personal devices and e-squads, enabling journalists and sources to securely exchange files despite mass surveillance, with improved privacy and reliability over existing onion routing methods.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel concept of e-squads and a decentralized onion routing network that enhances privacy and robustness for anonymous communication using personal devices.

Findings

Spores achieves competitive performance in anonymous routing.

Privacy properties outperform existing onion routing strategies.

The protocol is robust against device unreliability.

Abstract

Mass surveillance of the population by state agencies and corporate parties is now a well-known fact. Journalists and whistle-blowers still lack means to circumvent global spying for the sake of their investigations. With Spores, we propose a way for journalists and their sources to plan a posteriori file exchanges when they physically meet. We leverage on the multiplication of personal devices per capita to provide a lightweight, robust and fully anonymous decentralised file transfer protocol between users. Spores hinges on our novel concept of e-squads: one's personal devices, rendered intelligent by gossip communication protocols, can provide private and dependable services to their user. People's e-squads are federated into a novel onion routing network, able to withstand the inherent unreliability of personal appliances while providing reliable routing. Spores' performances are competitive, and its privacy properties of the communication outperform state of the art onion routing strategies.