Panetière, frequently asked questions

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  • What is panetière?

    Panetière is an anonymous broadcast protocol. In panetière, clients running in a trusted execution environment hold messages they want to publish and servers provide the service through which they can do so anonymously.

  • What is an anonymous broadcast?

  • What are some previous works that have served as inspiration and building blocks for panetière?

    In DC-Nets (“Dining Cryptographers” Nets) participants simultaneously contribute to a shared computation that reveals a batch of messages without linking sender to message. DC-Nets can provide strong sender anonymity with moderate latency in synchronous settings, but typically at the cost of higher bandwidth and computational overheads.

    A recent anonymous communication protocol called ZipNet made a simple, but powerful observation. When designing an anonymous communication protocols, many of the computational and bandwidth inefficiencies stem from the need to ensure liveness, rather than anonymity. Leveraging this observation, ZipNet ensures liveness with the help of TEEs and ensures anonymity via classical cryptographic means. Should a TEE be broken, the system may become unresponsive, but anonymity does not rely on the security of TEEs.

    See Avoiding Client Disruption in Anonymous Broadcast Protocols

  • What is a trusted execution environment?

    A trusted execution environment (TEE) is an area of the computer processor that isolates execution code and data and protects them from being accessed by other processes executing in the same processor. It also provides an attestation that works as a proof that the processor executed the requested code unmodified, to protect from backdoor attacks .

    See Trusted execution environment - Wikipedia

  • Why do clients have to run in a trusted execution environment?

  • What are the cryptographic primitives and constructions used in panetière?

  • Is panetière secure to quantum attacks?

    Panetière relies on the hardness of the short integer solution problem, which is currently thought, but not proven, to be secure against a cryptanalytic attack by a quantum computer.

    See Short integer solution problem - Wikipedia and Post-quantum cryptography - Wikipedia

  • What are the security guarantees of panetière?

  • What are some use cases for panetière?

    We are analyzing and prototyping many use cases for panetière. As we consolidate them and test them for security, we will be sharing the details.
    If you have any use cases in mind, please reply here and we will help you analyzing them for security and performance.

  • What kind of use cases are not protected by anonymous broadcast protocol like panetière?

Existing anonymity solutions, such as TOR and Nym, require users to choose between weak anonymity or high latency.

  • How does panetière relate to a mixnet like Nym?

    Mix-Nets, such as Nym, achieve stronger anonymity against global passive adversaries. They rely on cover traffic, and batching and reordering of messages, which introduces delays. The result is increased end-to-end latency and higher bandwidth overhead compared to low-latency networks.

  • How does panetière relate to onion routing?

    Onion routing, famously employed by the TOR network, is highly efficient in terms of bandwidth overhead and allows each client to asynchronously decide when to send their message. In practice, it can also achieve low latency, but at the cost of weak anonymity against adversarial network-level observers.

Do you have any more questions?

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