The internet’s “original sin” was that core infrastructure wasn’t designed with privacy in mind. Therefore the level of complicity involved in Mixnets — shuffling and delaying encrypted data packets in order to shield sender-to-recipient metadata from adversaries with a global view of a network — probably seemed like over-engineering all the way back when the web’s scaffolding was being pieced together.
Switzerland-based privacy startup Nym Technologies has raised $6 million, which is being loosely pegged as a Series A round. Nym’s pitch is it’s building “an open-ended anonymous overlay network that works to irreversibly disguise patterns in Internet traffic”.
It sets out the case on its website — arguing that “Tor’s anonymity properties can be defeated by an entity that is capable of monitoring the entire network’s ‘entry’ and ‘exit’ nodes” since it does not take the extra step of adding “timing obfuscation” or “decoy traffic” to obfuscate the patterns that could be exploited to deanonymize users.
Link: Nym gets $6M for its anonymous overlay mixnet to sell privacy as a service
via techcrunch.com
