MCMix: Anonymous Messaging via Secure Multiparty Computation

We present MCMix, an anonymous messaging system that completely hides communication metadata and can scale in the order of hundreds of thousands of users. Our approach is to isolate two suitable functionalities, called dialing and conversation, that when used in succession, realize anonymous messaging. With this as a starting point, we apply secure multiparty computation (“MC” or MPC) and proceed to realize them. We then present an implementation using Sharemind, a prevalent MPC system. Our implementation is competitive in terms of latency with previous messaging systems that only offer weaker privacy guarantees. Our solution can be instantiated in a variety of different ways with different MPC implementations, overall illustrating how MPC is a viable and competitive alternative to mix-nets and DC-nets for anonymous communication.