InterValue Anonymous Communication — Never Be a Silent Lamb in the Age of Privacy Leaks
Tags: Blockchain

InterValue Anonymous Communication — Never Be a Silent Lamb in the Age of Privacy Leaks InterValue Follow Aug 16, 2018 · 6 min read

Some obvious issues surround Privacy protection

In 2018, among a world population of 7.6 billion people, the number of “netizens” exceeds 4 billion. The rapid development of the Internet has led to dramatic changes in the society. Besides, social transformations and a variety of uncertainties have resulted in a growing “global anxiety” regarding data privacy issues, which cannot be avoided. Many kinds of privacy leaks have come to the surface, but most people remain silent. The Pentagon accidentally exposed the personal information of over 1.8 billion US citizens, Facebook has been caught leaking users’ private data, and some glitches in Accenture’s server encryption have been discovered. All these events have raised major concerns among Internet users. And yet, despite the fact that people are afraid that their information gets leaked online, they keep using the Internet. Most of these people remain silent about privacy breaches.

One cannot deny the fact that privacy protection is playing an important role in people’s life in the context of globalization. Anything we do on the Internet will generate usage records on the devices that process the information. These records may be collected, organized, analyzed and summarized at any time. They can even be used in business decision making processes and other illegal business activities. Blockchain technology now appears as a solution to this type of privacy breach. Most blockchains use Tor plus Trr, which makes private information theft more difficult. But this requires some sacrifices in terms of communication speed and efficiency.

To solve this problem, InterValue has developed a P2P-based anonymous communication technology combining the communication technology of the underlying P2P network with the existing Tor-based anonymous communication network, and the blockchain-based distributed VPN. This technology employs anonymous node access and implements a private encrypted communication protocol. It greatly enhances the anonymity of nodes within the communication network, ensuring that communication between nodes is difficult to track and crack. InterValue forms a distributed ledger system through “on-shard autonomy, inter-shard collaboration”. This method of fragmenting and reorganizing Tor relay nodes makes private data theft more difficult. In parallel, the large number of relay nodes in the P2P network solves the communication efficiency problem.

Tor-based anonymous communication network

InterValue uses a Tor-based anonymous access mechanism between nodes. “Tor” is a technology used to prevent online tracking of IP addresses and other violations of privacy. It was developed by US military and prevents tracing by allowing the connection to repeatedly jump over an anonymous relay chain that consists of anonymous ingress nodes, relay nodes, and egress nodes. Tor has many relay nodes in the world. When starting Tor online, people first enter the relay node in an encrypted way. Then the Tor client randomly selects three of the nodes for transit and will restart every few minutes to select. Finally, it arrives at the server. Among these three steps, the first two are encrypted, and only the egress node can see your real access information.

In a similar way, the anonymous communication protocol of InterValue is an optional method for light nodes to communicate with local full nodes. The routing is implemented by multi-hop asymmetric encryption, and the data request and return are implemented by the Web service’s request mode. The method of sending information and querying messages by light nodes in InterValue’s protocol will be introduced in the later part of the article.

Blockchain-based distributed VPN

In the “traditional” Internet protocol, when we use the VPN service, our IP address is mapped to the VPN provider and our home can be mapped by it .

According to IBM’s definition of P2P, which is referenced by the InterValue’s white paper, the P2P mechanism consists of several interconnected computers and has at least one of the following characteristics: 1. The system relies on active collaboration of marginalized (non-centralized server) devices, each member directly benefits from the participation of other members rather than the server; 2. the members of the system simultaneously play the role of the server and the client; 3, the users of the system application can recognize each other’s existence, and constitute a virtual or actual group.

When “traditional” VPNs merges P2P, they give birth to a new type of decentralized VPN. InterValue’s underlying communication network is a strong joint architecture of P2P plus VPN. Each node can become an equal VPN participant. The ownership and control of resources are dispersed to every node of the network. Communication on the network becomes easy and straightforward. P2P technology has changed the status of a central one based on a centralized VPN service provider, so that resources are not stored on a central server but stored on all users’ PCs. P2P technology makes the terminal become a device with dual features of server and client. InterValue, therefore, has decentralized features and takes the efficiency of anonymous communication into account.

InterValue’s anonymous communication network

InterValue’s original anonymous P2P communication network combines the advantages of existing Tor-based anonymous communication networks and blockchain-based distributed VPNs. This is not a pure P2P+Tor+VPN technology. From the design of layered fragmentation, this anonymous communication network supports shard communication, inter-shard collaboration, and cross-chain communication and multi-chain merging. This anonymous communication network supports the relay chain technology and the security of cross-chain operations.

For a specific operation, InterValue’s anonymous communication is shown as below

When transmitting the information, the light node selects two or more local full nodes in the shard according to a certain rule, such as b, c, d, and e in the figure. The light node a uses the asymmetric encryption method to pre-send the information. It then encrypts the IP address of each selected local node to obtain the encrypted information, and transmits the encrypted information to b; b decrypts with the private key to obtain new encrypted information and the address of the relay node. b sends the new encrypted information to the node c. Similarly, c, d decrypts and passes the final encrypted information to node e, which decrypts the received information with its own private key to obtain the original information.

When the light node wants to query information, the light node a selects two or more local full nodes in the shard according to a certain rule (taking b, c, d, and e as examples), and the query request (including the query identifier, query account, encrypted routing data, etc.) is sent anonymously to node e according to the method of sending information. e encrypts the query result with a public key of a, and returns to the accessing local full node b according to the routing information in reverse order; b will encrypt the result returned to a. a uses the private key to decrypt the above information to obtain the query result.

A large number of relay local full-node collaboration exists in the P2P mechanism, which paves the way for the construction of the ecosystem. Coupled with the Tor-based node anonymous access technology and private encryption communication protocol, InterValue’s design greatly enhances the anonymity of nodes in the communication network. Undoubtedly, it ensures that communication between nodes is difficult to track and crack.

End

Anonymous communication is an important feature in the implementation of InterValue’s vision. Without anonymous communication, we will only see broken blockchain projects that are similar to the traditional Internet environment and still lead to “privacy leaking anxiety”. InterValue’s TestNetV2.0 with its confirmed 280,000 TPS within one shard, has been performing better than its global competitors. But in Q3, the project team will continue to follow the roadmap. V3.0 and V4.0 will bring major breakthroughs. The globalization of privacy breaches is constantly spurring the new privacy protection technologies. Only by solving this problem can we truly build a “Global Value Internet”!

Hosted by the InterValue’s Foundation, “InterValue, Building an Ecology — The World’s first Leading Million TPS Public Chain Technology Summit Forum” will be held on August 18, 2018, in Beijing. This forum will have a deep discussion on the key issues in the development of the blockchain industry. “What is the next step in the development of the blockchain industry? When will the phenomenon of block-level blockchain put into public? What characteristics should the blockchain infrastructure of scale application have? How can the blockchain infrastructure be built to break through the technical bottleneck of the application? How does the blockchain infrastructure provide comprehensive ecological construction?” It provides a high level of communication for the industry. The platform provides a brainstorming gathering for academics, media, institutions, application companies, and technical communities, and brings people together to jointly build a new blockchain 4.0 ecosystem. Please visit the web for more details:

Forum official website: http://818.inve.one