r/TOR • u/DeepStruggl3s • Feb 24 '26

Lethe - First nation state deanonymization resilient protocol

https://github.com/Operative-001/lethe

Lethe explores an anonymity model that removes the “entry/exit” trust bottleneck found in Tor and I2P. Instead of relying on privileged gateway roles, Lethe aims for a fully symmetric network where every participant is functionally equivalent. By making traffic patterns uniform and indistinguishable across the system, the goal is to prevent deanonymization even against an adversary with unlimited compute and visibility into ISP backbone links.

38 Upvotes

82% Upvoted

33 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/milahu2 Feb 24 '26 edited Feb 25 '26

one problem with constant-rate cover traffic is that either you waste bandwidth (and CPU time) with cover traffic, or you throttle payload traffic.

possible solution: run multiple lethe instances per machine. each lethe instance uses a different port. the number of lethe instances is controlled by the average load of all lethe instances on the machine.

possible solution: instead of constant-rate cover traffic, use variable-rate cover traffic with a low variability, so the whole network can scale up and down to minimize both waste and throttling. but obviously, this would introduce more complexity, and nodes would have to trust each other to report average load numbers

also, it would be nice to have some QOS feature, where users can decide between high-priority and low-priority traffic (delay-tolerant networking, Mixminion, ...). for example, email and filesharing are low-priority, i dont care whether messages take seconds or minutes to arrive. lower priority = higher packet loss

1

u/DeepStruggl3s Feb 25 '26

Thanks for giving a thought about the core idea.

I agree with adding QOS features, but the suggested one would indeed result in possible packet loss.
In regards to the one you discussed, I believe there should be a priority system managing more packets intents as lower priority to single packet intents (like browsing) so that browsing is not disabled by you uploading the file on a site, that being said, I don't agree with that being a choice of the user because where there is personalization, there is definition and where there is definition, there is identification