The Internet was not designed with privacy and anonymity in mind, and so who you are communicating with and what you are saying may be seen by network observers unless specific measures are taken. During the last decade there have been increasing concerns about privacy in online communications culminating in significant developments in the relevant legal framework in Europe as exemplified by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), introduced in 2016 and implemented in 2018. Despite these developments the state of the art in the availability of privacy enhancing tools is still dire and European businesses and organisations have no reliable underlying infrastructure for providing privacy enhancing services.
The PANORAMIX team worked with the aim to provide Internet user privacy through the development of a multipurpose freely accessible platform based on 'mix-networks' (mix-nets), [1]. Mix-nets protect not only the content of communications from third parties, but also obfuscate the identity of the senders or receivers of messages, through the use of cryptographic relays. Mix-nets are networks of servers that receive messages from multiple senders, shuffle them, and then send them to their final destination. This means it is not possible to find the correspondence between network inputs and network outputs, making the network a completely opaque transmission relay system.
The aim of the PANORAMIX project was two-fold. First, deliver a framework for application development that utilises mix-nets and incorporates various mix-net implementations. The objective of the framework is to enable application development that utilises mix-net technology while exposing the programmers as little as possible to the underlying cryptography. The second objective of the project was to the showcase the framework in three high value use-cases that have wide exploitation potential (see [7] for links to these outputs).
The use-cases that were used to exemplify the PANORAMIX framework were E-voting, anonymised data collection and private messaging. The Zeus e-voting platform was developed by partner GRNET and delivers currently a most versatile Internet-based voting platform. Zeus has been used in hundreds of elections during the course of the project and is current a state of the art open platform e-voting system that can be freely used [5]. For anonymised data collection, SAP built an application for data collection and anonymisation that is now is in the process of being incorporated into the SAP HANA database management system. Finally, for private messaging, the project team built Katzenpost [6], a platform for mixing e-mail messages and a corresponding Android application.
Taking the efforts of the consortium further, members of the PANORAMIX consortium created NYM Technologies [4], a spin-off company that will take PANORAMIX outputs as a custodian and deliver mix-net services in additional application domains focusing first on the cryptocurrency space as well as in private e-mail and instant messaging. The startup, based in Switzerland, has already received venture capital funding, [2], and is currently in the process of setting up an EU based subsidiary.
References
[1] The Panoramix Video,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQtk0NcTseg(odnośnik otworzy się w nowym oknie)[2] Rachel Rose O’Leary, This Binance Labs-Backed Crypto Startup Wants to Anonymize Everything,
https://www.coindesk.com/this-binance-backed-crypto-startup-wants-to-anonymize-everything(odnośnik otworzy się w nowym oknie)[3] The Panoramix Project Web-Site,
https://panoramix-project.eu(odnośnik otworzy się w nowym oknie)[4] Nym Technologies,
https://nymtech.net(odnośnik otworzy się w nowym oknie)[5] The Zeus e-voting platform,
https://zeus.grnet.gr/zeus/(odnośnik otworzy się w nowym oknie)[6] Katzenpost
https://katzenpost.mixnetworks.org(odnośnik otworzy się w nowym oknie)[7] Panoramix.me
https://panoramix.me(odnośnik otworzy się w nowym oknie)
