# Theo Goodman - an Introduction to nym

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2020-10-09
- Duration: 14:19
- Topics: blockchain, smart contracts, distributed ledger, ethereum
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-ChpJJzg0Ktk
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChpJJzg0Ktk

## Description

Berlin Ethereum Meetup - January 2020

## Transcript

so here Yasuo hi everyone I'm Theo Goodman and today I'm gonna tell you about NIMH does anyone in here drink water good good because humans drink water that's a good that's a good first sign so uh I'm gonna name is a mix net and but first we're just gonna have we're gonna go through a discussion that some guys had the other day you know because Internet traffic is observable by GPA so GPA is global passive adversary you know like NSA or big China all that stuff but I use grin which is a really cool privacy [ __ ] coin and tour and signal on giant on chain metadata can be harvested and Exploited are you signal traffic analysis of signal can reveal who is talking to who when and where through the metadata if you observe this the signal servers I thought if I use a privacy [ __ ] coin I'm good to go [ __ ] yeah so this is a typical thing at I used I used monaro I'm good I used PIPA cash I'm fine I use the theorem I'm safe but there's still the metadata out there so there's again the basic problems Internet traffic is observable and that goes for if you use Z cache if you use a theory of Manero grin all that stuff it's you can all observe it and you can do chain analysis all the all the things going in and out of the servers and tour it just really obscures your IP address geolocation not the metadata so we need privacy on a different level again and also there's no incentives so tor the usage of tor has gone up a lot in the last years but there's still only about 7,000 or 8,000 nodes and the geolocation of those nodes the diversity of them is not it's not expanding it's all on a volunteer basis a lot of them are in Germany but that's not really growing as as the network usage grows so there's no so the incentives are messed up and what can what could some of the you know global adversaries passive adversaries use all this data for what do they want to know why are they trying to you know anticipate you know what I'm gonna drink if I'm gonna drink Grenada Apfel mate' or the normal one or what are they using all this for well maybe for a social credit system maybe for to stop whistleblowers maybe to you know just commercialize mass surveillance in general so just want to tell you back up a little bit and tell you a little bit about NIM and where the team comes from where where some of this technology comes from so after the Snowden revelations some people created panoramix and they approached the European Union for funding to build a mix net because they said Europe can't depend just on tour they need to build something stronger and not just depend on on tour and so they and panoramics invented something called loop X they built loop X and Lew picks is being used in a lot of mixed nets that right now get into that too and over here of the obscure loved antara that made facebook's Libre possible so there's also a ironic link to NIMH and Facebook which seems weird but at George in the picture his startup was bought he fir he was working on NIMH which is anonymous mix net technology and then he was essentially poached by Facebook and now he works on Libre however one other guy from Dave from that was also went over to Facebook left Facebook to work on NIMH so it's kind of an ironic it's kind of could be made into a TV show one day but if you do so maybe give us some credit so mix now what is a mixer has anyone ever heard of a mixin it may be anonymous email remailers good for example I mean they've been around for a while for example Adam Beck who's really into Bitcoin he used to have an email remailer that used a mix net it was really slow high latency and it was abused and when Adam Beck did that he was like damn what maybe I need to create something like proof of work so that it's not Sybil attacked all the time so that was one of the motivations to do that so now we're but the thing was they were very they're very slow and their have high latency but now with the technology we have today we have an opportunity to bring this old technology back and maybe use it for something really really useful so just like tor maybe you're familiar with that it does have multiple hops what's something that's unlocked or is that it has decoy traffic so called cover traffic and the other thing that's very very important unlike tor is that it has the the timing is obscure so it's asymmetrical timing of the cover traffic so it's not like like earlier I thought if that was a techno club upstairs someone was banging but so if the if the cover traffic is like a techno club well then I mean a global adversary can you know see through that eventually but if it's like a scratching DJ that's changing the BPM all the time depend depending on the packets coming in and the amount of them then it's really hard to figure out like who is that do I want to watch this packet what's this it all kind of blends in and it's it's very plausibly deniable about what packet is what so that's kind of a way to explain it you can imagine and it's scalable like tor in the sense that it's a general mix net it's made for so here we're at the etherium Meetup well the mix neck is essentially a message can be sent through and it could be a signed transaction it could be a simple a theorem transaction could be taps that want to use it but we also don't want to say oh this is like only for theater know it could be Bitcoin could Bitcoin transactions could go through it messaging system like whatsapp could use it for example because we are they you need a lot in order to have a good and amenity set you need a lot of traffic you don't need to specialize you need to have more of a general scope like tour tour also does that so this is how it were a basic outline of how it works the spins the packets come in the mix nodes are in the middle with the N and then the dummy packets or the decoy traffic also is in their timing also the timing thing happens all in there and the packets go out and you can compare that so this is I don't fall down here so tor looks more like this and a VPN looks more like this so you can compare the different things that are at mostly the decoy traffic and the timing of that so maybe you've heard of Katzen post which is a pretty cool project it uses loop X what I was talking about earlier that that they worked on so that uses loop X and while that's cool it's highly specialized so that's one problem it's like right now I think it's used for a mostly email it's highly specialized and it's kind of unclear who gets to run a node it's not permission like not anyone can just join the mix node Network as far as I understand current the current update and then there was this other thing that came out Mason but Mason is essentially a fork of Katzen post which also uses loop picks and it says it's just for aetherium so there's a lot of problems there the problem is is that it's highly specialized like I said so then the inanimate the an amenity set is just as big as all the daps maybe if that's what it's made for all the etherium users and not as big as as it could be for example the other thing is that um both cats on post and Mason they don't have the that they don't change the speed of the cover traffic so there's a so there's a problem there so maybe it's just is even questionable as if it's better than using tor or not so you're going go through my points again centralized in permissioned PKI so it's not not any one can join either one of those networks as a mix note it's unclear who controls that right now for both of those whereas with NIM it's gonna be a permissionless network for the mix notes so and here we go to kind of like see cats in post and Mason Mason is cats in post Lou picks NIM the team NIM team gave you Lou pics and addressing issues with scalability and privacy Olympics there you go I could have just done that instead of wallet X but here we go so NIM blockchain PKI private key credentials anonymous credentials and the validators they kind of watch over the network and check that the mix nodes are not acting maliciously and trying to ddos everything and if they do they get kicked out of the network there's a very simplified way to explain it but that's how it works and the tokens reward the mix nodes as a kind of proof of mix so yeah and this is how I was talking about how the DJ is scratching these changing the speed oops he's changing the speed of the records and going back and forth and you can't really tell so this is not it's dynamically controlled how the decoy traffic and how the network are just so it's scalable because if you just set it as one parameter then it's it's easy it's the same thing like okay I got 120 beats per minute and I just set the decoy traffic is 120 meet 20 bit okay that's more confusing but it's not that hard to to see through it again permission this mix mining so instead of proof of work proof of mix for the mix nodes what else validators transform named tokens into credentials so the thing is that the whole thing with the validators you'd almost need a whole other talk to to go to go about that and there's also a video from Harry from Kaos communication camp that was in the summer but basically like I said the validators are just watching the the mick the mix nodes and making sure that they're not malicious and they're actually doing what they say they're going to do so timeline we are actually on time amazing huh so check this out so we get this December 2019 test buddy test net debugging at CCC check that happened test net launched with some volunteers from the workshop at in Leipzig then January 2020 launch alpha test necks with launched check it's live you can join it now February 2020 on alpha test net should be no problem there is someone that already has a messaging app that is using the test net right now so that's pretty cool very big goal by the end of 2020 launch main net and end mass surveillance what you think possible okay wait so I think this is where we right now we're hope hopeful whoa jack with it with a really cool NIMH t-shirt there right now they're very rare than em t-shirts but they were available at CCC but now we're it was kind of hopeful whoa Jack I think this is the state of the project right now and if you want to communicate with any of us check out you could check out telegram T that mean inch an NIMH tech net and if you want to get into the technical name tech dot slash Doc's also I think the other one had the github here's where you can download the node right away and just connect it pretty self-explanatory and that's what I've got thank you very much so any questions it's the PKI just a smart contract or how's it solved because I remember the last time I talked with Harry there wasn't really a full solution to it good question I don't think it's not just one smart contract but I also cannot explain it off the cuff because they have all these so each epoch of the mixing has some kind of encryption thing that they do and then the Valladares check it I can't tell you much more that it's not just one smart contract though it's more complicated okay that's probably why he couldn't say either all right thanks more questions any other questions please feel free to contact me when we're just hanging out here if anyone's around question in the back doesn't have the concept of hidden services that's a good question so right now there so there was a question can't you run the validator in the mix net itself and theoretically you could but right now we're not there yet because there's some kind of there could be I think there could even be collusion problems so you want the pique Zuzu's for example hidden service let's say that the validator with the public addresses was hidden right I mean there's kind of like a discussion about that maybe in the future after everything after the real simple things work but right now no do we have a last question all right so thank you very much thank you [Applause]