International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

IACR News item: 14 October 2022

Paul Bunn, Eyal Kushilevitz, Rafail Ostrovsky
ePrint Report ePrint Report
The Non-Interactive Anonymous Router (NIAR) model was introduced by Shi and Wu [SW21] as an alternative to conventional solutions to the anonymous routing problem, in which a set of senders wish to send messages to a set of receivers. In contrast to most known approaches to support anonymous routing (e.g. mix-nets, DC-nets, etc.) which rely on a network of routers communicating with users via interactive protocols, the NIAR model assumes a $single$ router and is inherently $non$-$interactive$ (after an initial setup phase). In addition to being non-interactive, the NIAR model is compelling due to the security it provides: instead of relying on the honesty of some subset of the routers, the NIAR model requires anonymity even if the router (as well as an arbitrary subset of senders/receivers) is corrupted.

In this paper, we present a protocol for the NIAR model that improves upon the results from [SW21] in two ways:

- Improved computational efficiency (quadratic to near linear): Our protocol matches the communication complexity of [SW21] for each sender/receiver, while reducing the computational overhead for the router to polylog overhead instead of linear overhead.

- Relaxation of assumptions: Security of the protocol in [SW21] relies on the Decisional Linear assumption in bilinear groups; while security for our protocol follows from the existence of any rate-1 oblivious transfer (OT) protocol (instantiations of this primitive are known to exist under DDH, QR and LWE [DGI19,GHO20]).
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