[liberationtech] Broadcast Anonymous Routing

[Marc W. Abel]

Hi George,

Where can I find the BAR paper referenced on [1]?  It would help me 
understand some of your decisions and threat model better.  I also will 
need to cite it in my own papers.

You might also be interested in Clique [2], which I published July 4 and 
announced on this list August 4.  Your feedback on that would be 
splendid, although I need to write a paper with some better 
explanations.  A short comparison, as I understand things:

1.  Both of us made very poor choices when we named our protocols. How 
on earth is someone to find us on a search engine?

2.  BAR communicates via an anonymity network like Tor (?)  Clique is 
not an anonymity protocol; it is a metadata privacy protocol.

3.  BAR aims to provide low latency.  Clique is intended to be a little 
faster than U.S. Mail.

4.  BAR's per-network scaleability limit is a few hundred nodes. Clique 
is intended to be "good" at 30,000 nodes and "fair" at 1,000,000 nodes.

5.  BAR costs "a few Mbps" of bandwidth.  Clique hasn't even been tested 
that fast, but is designed to consume roughly one VOIP channel's 
bandwidth equivalent in common use.

6.  BAR appears to be written in... Python?  Clique had a Python 
implementation, but it proved unwieldy.  Its reference implementation is 
written in C.

7.  BAR's user interface is ... not known to me.  Clique's user 
interface /doesn't exist/ today, although sample scripts are provided.

8.  BAR's encryption is ... well, I'm not sure.  Clique's encryption is 
a little nonstandard and a little controversial.

9.  Does BAR work on mobile devices?  Clique does not work natively on 
mobile devices, although workarounds exist if a user can arrange for a 
secure non-mobile node.

Marc



On 08/17/2014 01:31 PM, George Chatzisofroniou wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> We released a TL;DR guide on broadcast anonymity [1] that i think you'll find
> interesting.
>
> Feedback is very welcome,
>
> [1]: https://sophron.github.io/BAR/
> [2]: http://clique4.us/