Nym: Lunarpunk Infrastructure for securing the Solarpunk Ecosystem

During the Status side event at EthCC, Serinko from Nym core team laid out how Ethereum is designed with transparency in mind but total…

Author: Nym

July 27, 20235 mins read

Serinko at the Status side event during EthCC. Image courtesy of Adrien Thibault (Twitter, Instagram)

During the Status side event at EthCC, Serinko from Nym core team laid out how Ethereum is designed with transparency in mind but total transparency doesn’t protect users from powerful network adversaries, or anyone at all. Read on to learn why Nym does.

Core to the sun-dappled Solarpunk movement, which envisions a more sustainable collective future as an antidote to the doomerist dystopia that swaddles us, is transparency. With an ecosystem characterised by optimism, openness and transparency, little wonder that Ethereum has been compared to Solarpunk.

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But there are few places as sunny yet bereft of anywhere to secrete oneself as the desert, said Serinko, developer relations for the Nym core team at the Status side event of the Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC) in Paris last week. The visibility in this most Solarpunk of all terrain runs two ways: you can see everyone else, but they can see you too.

Perhaps ‘Lunarpunk,’ with its aesthetics of dense forested thickets, has something to teach Solarpunk. Lunarpunk doesn’t avoid the smouldering rays of the sun, but proposes a forested environment where life can thrive, with added dens, dugouts and hollows in which to conceal oneself, should prying eyes wish to monitor or cause you harm.

This is where the Nym mixnet comes in: dropping mighty Lunarpunk redwoods in the sandy desertscape dunes and, with the new Libp2p integration, securing Ethereum in the process.

There is no opposition between night and day, just as there is no opposition between Lunarpunk and Solarpunk. Privacy and security is the basis of openness and freedom, not its opposition.

Read on to learn more:

What does Nym mean for Ethereum and privacy?

Autonomous, free and decentralised communities will not happen without anonymity and privacy at their core. But this is not how Ethereum is designed, especially following the move to its Proof of Stake consensus algorithms last year.

The new algorithms mean that validators must coordinate on who creates the next block in the blockchain, and that means more traffic between validators. All of this traffic can be analysed, compromising validator privacy and opening the infrastructure up to attacks, from MEV Bots and DDoS attacks to targeted censorship.

Privacy on the internet is broken by design. This is because, at the network level, all traffic is at the mercy of powerful adversaries, or overseers with practically endless compute power and energy capable of monitoring any activity on the network.

Projects like Signal or Monero still suffer from metadata leaks at the network level, and VPNs aren’t the answer, because IP addresses are only concealed rather than protecting traffic and metadata. (Not to mention that the traffic is collected and centralised by VPN providers.) Even Tor falls short in the face of traffic analysis from powerful adversaries such as the NSA, which are capable of performing time correlation attacks.

The solution is to create a privacy layer by default for all internet traffic. The Nym mixnet routes traffic through multiple nodes, unlinking origin and destination, like Tor. But unlike Tor, Nym gives additional cover too, including by adding ‘dummy’ traffic to fool snoopers. Packets are re-ordered at each hop, preventing de-anonymisation, while unlike blockchains, the Nym mixnet is designed for horizontal scalability.

While Ethereum 2.0 aims to separate validator identity from network identity, researchers have shown Nym that it’s easy to connect the two by essentially looking at a batch of rewards.

Because the Ethereum algorithm is fundamentally deterministic, it’s possible to predict which validators will be working on the next block. And if you have this information, you can then DDoS that validator and knock them offline. Another issue is that full transparency on Ethereum also means revealing IP address and therefore your geographic location — i.e. where you live.

Nym mixnet: securing Ethereum

The ChainSafe team has integrated Nym for Libp2p into their Lighthouse rust implementation of the Ethereum consensus client. The code is fully open source and available right now on GitHub — try it out!

Nym pluggable transports into their stacks via Lighthouse, the Rust implementation of the Ethereum consensus client. You simply plug Nym into Libp2p, turn it on, and the Nym mixnet is immediately available, obfuscating network traffic on-chain. In short: this makes integrating a privacy layer into any Libp2p stack simple.

Right now, the Nym mixnet speed is 300–400 milliseconds, which is fast enough to mix data packets and fit into the Ethereum block production. With upcoming Sphinx packet upgrades, thanks to cryptographer Daniel Bernstein who works on Curve25519, this will most likely become two to four times faster in future.

The Nym SDK team is now working on a general Libp2p integration, using the Nym Rust SDK. Libp2p is an integration module designed by Protocol Labs that can run across different network protocols: a peer-to-peer networking framework that has been groundbreaking for decentralised networking, and is used in major blockchain ecosystems like IPFS Polkadot and Ethereum.

To learn more about protecting the Ethereum ecosystem with the Nym mixnet, why Nym adds Lunarpunk infrastructure to the Solarpunk scene — as well as what’s next for Nym and Ethereum with Aztec — watch Serinko’s talk in full below:

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