The concept of electronic anonymity has many names associated with it, and one of the most relevant is David Chaum, considered the inventor of "digital money", among other things. Chaum has not remained silent in the face of the hard conflict between privacy advocates and security agencies, and his solution to this problem is PrivaTegrity, a network that promises to be much more secure than Tor, though it possesses an undoubtedly controversial element: a monitored "backdoor".
The worst moment for online privacy
Privacy and anonymity on the Web are going through their worst moment. National security agencies have not stopped collecting data for a single second, and to this we must add the unfortunate statements of several politicians who, based on ignorance, believe it is possible to install "exceptions" in an encryption system without weakening it. The world of computer security has tried to explain this to the point of exhaustion, mainly because of the detail that a backdoor could be used by anyone, including those forces that are sought to be fought. In the midst of all this, David Chaum, mastermind behind several cryptographic protocols, recently presented a new vision in encryption called cMix, a more advanced version of his routing protocols known as "mix networks," from which the very onion routing we know in Tor emerged.
cMix would function as the basis for a new network called PrivaTegrity, with a structure of nine servers that combine a series of keys, multiplication and division processes on these same keys, and insertion of random values. According to Chaum, offloading the heaviest processing onto the servers allows PrivaTegrity to offer a performance level similar to Tor (latency remains a critical factor here), with much higher security. However, efficiency and security are not the only things under PrivaTegrity's wing. Chaum's overall plan seeks to eliminate the conflict with authorities at its root. How? With a backdoor.
In essence, attacking a single PrivaTegrity server individually achieves nothing, but if all nine servers work simultaneously, it is possible to reconstruct a user's data. Chaum explains it as "a door with nine padlocks," and proposes for the administration of this backdoor a kind of international council, made up of nine members scattered around the globe (just like the servers). This council must act unanimously before responding to any request from authorities, and one of Chaum's opinions is to limit this to the most severe cases. Needless to say, the expert community jumped down Chaum's throat (after all, a secure network with a backdoor "is not" secure), but the main doubt is even more direct: If it is already known in advance that PrivaTegrity has a controlled backdoor, who is going to use it?
