Determine parameters for Meson

[Mikerah]

In order to guarantee a decent tradeoff between strong anonymity, latency, bandwidth, etc., we need to determine what a production working Meson mixnet will look like by considering the following parameters: # of mixes, # of authorities and # of providers. For a Meson testnet, we can set these parameters low i.e. set everything to 1, and as we learn more about the mixnet, we can increase the parameters as needed.

Some ways to determine parameters can be found in the Anonymity Trilemma paper. We can also look at the Nym repositories for ideas on how they do this.

[Mikerah]

From the loopix paper, they recommend at least 3 layers of mix nodes, and at 2 msgs per mix for good anonymity. For their experimental setup, the computational requirements for a mix is 2.3 GHz and 64 GB of RAM and for a provider, 256 GB of RAM. These are quite expensive, although access to such computers will get cheaper.

There's still much to determine with respect to the number of mix nodes, the number of providers and details around the PKI authority.

[Mikerah]

So, for tests purposes, we have this basic initial parameterization:

• 1 authority
• 2 providers
• 3 layers of 2 mix nodes each. So, 6 mix nodes.

We will be doing initial testing on this setup and see how we can improve upon this.

[Mikerah]

Notes on how to go about parameterizing a mixnet: https://hackmd.io/cAFHveghQTCVHea0lB2kaw

[0xKarl98]

WIP on 'paramterizing the Meson' Hackmd link : https://hackmd.io/m5Dgbb0WR7WyA_U4MdkSgA needs more discussion and improvements