Mix Networks: Existing Scenarios and Future Directions on Security and Privacy

Background: Privacy-enhancing techniques are developed in order to provide strong protection to cyberspace. These techniques aim to allow users to keep their identities hidden during the communication when they are sending an email, making payments online, browsing the Web, or posting to newsgroups. MixNet is the most practical solution for concealing identities of message and sender’s identities. Objective: It provides the sender and receiver anonymity as well as message security. The main goal of MixNet is to overcome vulnerability and enhance the performance of communication. It can efficiently handle the messages of various lengths and produce desirable results with privacy. The goal of this patent is to acquire information and concepts regarding MixNet. We also grant hints for future lookups and references. Methods: The design of MixNet depends on what the cryptosystem method is used. Symmetric and Asymmetric both are used. Other methods could be also used such as PIR, CSP and FDR model, RPC, Token-based approach, or others. Result: In this patent, we provided an overview of MixNet approaches and presented a survey on MixNet based techniques and different models. We also constructed the comparison tables as per our requirements for better understanding. For this purpose, we found a total of 120 articles related to the MixNet published between 1990 and 2018 from the most relevant scientific resources. However, only 86 papers were analyzed due to comprehensiveness and relevancy in this article. Conclusion: Focused on the security and privacy of communication and how it can be achieved. This patent also reveals research progress and research gap on MixNet.