Mix Broadcast Network With User Untraceability for Resource-Constrained IoT

Abstract

With the tremendous growth of information and communications technology, the needs of user untraceability have opened the door for many potential applications in Internet of Things (IoT). The network (MN) was invented in 1981 to provide untraceability of a message sender. Most MNs are implemented by traffic routing in end-to-end networks. Each message is layered encrypted following the chain of proxy servers in an MN using public-key cryptography. Each proxy server strips off its own layer of encryption to reveal where to send the message next. This breaks the link between the source and the destination, making it harder for eavesdroppers to trace end-to-end communications. If all but one of the proxy servers is compromised by the tracer, untraceability of a message can still be achieved. Important applications of MNs are secure electronic voting, anonymous email, anonymous telecommunication and hiding of IP address, etc. In this letter, we propose a novel design of a mix broadcast network. The untraceability is achieved by a simple cryptographic algorithm to mix information in a broadcast channel. The computation needed in this algorithm is the logic Exclusive-OR operation, which is one of the fastest operations so far. Our proposal is especially suitable for wireless resource-constrained IoT.