Please help me understand something about the Nym network design, in the whitepaper it says:
mixnets route each message independently, through a different route and without guaranteeing in-order delivery
Does this mean that on anonymous mode each connection to a website gets a different IP address? If not, does Nym have plans to tackle the IP correlation problem? If the websites I visit get the same IP address that my crypto wallet uses for transactions and that is the same the Youtube app gets then even if my connections are otherwise untraceable this could still allow for profiling of users. Sorry if I didn’t notice something obvious in the whitepaper, it’s very technical so a lot of it goes above my head.
At this time, we do not give each app/website a new IP address.
Yes, if you’re signed into Youtube on your phone, and you use Paypal or some other app requiring authentication, those services will know you signed in. However, they won’t know where in the world you are, your IP address is protected.
If you are concerned about cross-app/website tracking, you should use a browser such as Brave in combination with Nym. This will protect you against fingerprinting attacks and such, and if you don’t login to any other accounts while you do sensitive activities, this should be sufficient protection.
Thanks for the info! I guess in the meantime since I’m in android I’ll also make different user profiles, each with an instance of the Nym app.
But please consider implementing an option for this in the future! Or at least a way to rotate the gateways regularly! The Tor project thinks this is a privacy issue precisely because of possible correlation by websites or the exit node’s ISP, their browser isolates each tab so they have a different path (and probably exit IP), Whonix and Tails also give different paths to their included apps and according to the Safing team their SPN “calculates an individual path for every connection…”
Given that Nym’s userbase is probably smaller than Tor, and that Nym users are discouraged from regularly changing their exit gateways because of the “monthly bandwidth exceeded” issue, having a single, non-rotating exit IP may be an even bigger problem.
Also it may be useful for people who want to avoid this possible correlation but:
-Don’t have multiple devices
-Their devices can’t use multiple profiles
-Fear that using multiple devices/profiles may trigger the bandwidth exceeded thing
Hey,
Yes, we’re working on supporting gateway rotation to defeat end-to-end attacks. Additionally, we are testing some fixes that should resolve the bandwidth issue.
Thank you for your feedback!