The public and private are not opposites, they are complementary: privacy is needed to sustain the security and integrity of people as well as infrastructure that serve the public good. This workshop presents the cypherpunk principle for understanding the public and private, namely “transparency for the powerful, privacy for the rest of us” - showing how to operationalise this in the context of decentralised infrastructures. The workshop presents the Nym mixnet as a privacy commons for libp2p, a core module for decentralised networking, used by Ethereum consensus clients and beyond. Recently, Chainsafe built a proof of concept integration of Nym for Lighthouse. This workshop will demo working code for running Libp2p traffic through the Nym mixnet, built with the Nym Rust SDK.

Distributed infrastructures suffer from a common vulnerability: that traffic is exposed, can reveal IP addresses and be used to deanonymise operators. This puts both operator as well as nodes at risk of DDoS attacks as well as censorship. Mixnets function like a forest surrounding and sustaining the public goods of such core modules: they encrypt and mix network traffic across several layers of mix nodes, adding small time delays - a leafy canopy to obscure the patterns of communication that might otherwise reveal sensitive network information.
<tags>Nym</tags>