MessageVortex Transport Independent, Unobservable, and Unlinkable Messaging

In this thesis, we introduce an unobservable message anonymization protocol named MessageVortex. It is based on the zero-trust principle, has a distributed peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture, and avoids central aspects such as fixed infrastructures within a global network. It scores over existing work by blending its traffic into suitable standard transport protocols like SMTP, making it next to impossible to block it without significantly affecting regular users of the transport medium. No additional protocol-specific infrastructure is required in public networks and allows a sender to control all aspects of a message, such as the degree of anonymity, timing, and redundancy of the message transport, without disclosing any of these details to routing or transporting nodes. We have made our prototype implementation publicly available and added an RFC-style document that contains all necessary information to build a MessageVortex node, see https://messagevortex.net/.