Reliable and Private Anonymous Routing for Satellite Constellations

TL;DR

This paper presents a robust, privacy-preserving anonymous routing architecture for satellite constellations, combining multi-path transport, PIR, and adaptive delay strategies to enhance security, reliability, and anonymity in volatile LEO networks.

Contribution

It introduces a novel architecture that integrates multi-path erasure-coded transport, PIR-based route discovery, and adaptive delay strategies for improved anonymity and reliability in satellite networks.

Findings

Near-zero message loss with multi-path transport

PIR protocol is computationally feasible for deployment

Adaptive delay strategies effectively mitigate topological bias

Abstract

Shared, dynamic network infrastructures, such as dual-use LEO satellite constellations, pose critical threats to metadata privacy, particularly for state actors operating in mixed-trust environments. This work proposes an enhanced anonymity architecture, evolving the Loopix mix-network, to provide robust security and reliability in these volatile topologies. We introduce three primary contributions: (1) A multi-path transport protocol utilizing $(n, k)$ erasure codes, which is demonstrated to counteract the high link volatility and intermittent connectivity that renders standard mix-networks unreliable. (2) The integration of a computationally efficient Private Information Retrieval (PIR) protocol during route discovery. (3) The introduction of adaptive, centrality-based delay strategies that efficiently mitigate the inherent topological bias of LEO networks, providing a superior anonymity-to-latency trade-off. This mechanism provably prevents metadata leakage at the user-provider directory, mitigating profiling and correlation attacks. We validate this architecture via high-fidelity, packet-level simulations of a LEO constellation. Empirical results show our multi-path transport achieves near-zero message loss, establishing a quantifiable trade-off between reliability and bandwidth overhead. Furthermore, microbenchmarks of the PIR protocol quantify its computational and latency overheads, confirming its feasibility for practical deployment. This work provides a validated blueprint for deployable high-anonymity communication systems, demonstrating the viability of securely multiplexing sensitive operations within large-scale commercial network infrastructures.