HN: Amateur idea for an anonymity protocol

1 points by ellius 9y ago ↗ HN

I'm only a hobbyist, so this idea may have little merit, but I wanted to share it anyway and hear what people think.

I was watching a Snowden talk today about anonymizing more services by default, and I was thinking about potential methods to achieve that. I thought of the way people are starting to use cloud services for "burners" -- you can spin up and throw away an entire VM on a service like AWS or DO in no time, a docker container in even less.

What if a protocol tied clients to a constantly shifting cluster of VMs/containers that acted as proxies for some limited set of services? Could those be spun up, configured, assigned IPs, and thrown away at such a rate and in such a way as to better obscure individual behavior?

I'm not sure if this idea is substantively different from existing VPN services. I know it's half-baked and light on real technical understanding and details. Just came to mind and thought it couldn't hurt to share.

1 comment

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activatedgeek 9y ago ↗

What advantage would a protocol based on shifting machines have over something much cheaper like random number generation for say HTTPS communication?

At the end of the day, you'd fundamentally want the possibility of people guessing to be close to zero no matter what method you chose.

So, the question boils down to how could the idea of disposable VMs/containers be better than simply using better primes which use much lesser power and give a greater throughput?