Privacy is key for the online security and freedom of everybody. But it was not built into the fabric of the internet. Your online activity leaks important metadata, even if your messages are encrypted. Your IP address, the device you use, who you talk to, when and where, are exposed. This can be exploited by eavesdroppers to undermine your security, or can be used in large scale network analysis for mass surveillance, undermining our freedom and autonomy.

TL;DR

Nym is setting off to change this and to transform the internet. There are three key components in the Nym ecosystem: a mixnet, anonymous credentials and a token.

A mixnet is a decentralized network of computers arranged in 3 layers. Your data is sent through it with added layers of encryption. In each layer of the mixnet, your data is mixed with other people’s data making them indistinguishable from each other and private on the internet.

With Nym credentials you can prove your right to access to digital services while retaining your privacy. From accessing public services, to complying with banking regulation, controlling who has access to your medical data, or participating in online voting.

And finally tokens help govern the long term sustainability and scalability of the Nym network.

If you want to know more about how NYM works, read below.

The most widely used means of improving network-level privacy are VPNs (Virtual Private Net-works). VPNs build an encrypted tunnel between a user’s client device and a centralized server run by aVPN provider, which acts as proxy that forwards the client’s communications. VPNs are often misconfig-ured in ways that compromise security and even when configured correctly, VPNs are trivial tomonitor and censor by adversaries with just local network access at the VPN server. Such network adver-saries can correlate traffic in and out of the VPN server to reveal the identity and destination of the VPNuser, as well as block the VPN from being accessible.

In terms of their trust model, VPN providers canfullyobserve all network traffic between their usersand the public internet, meaning that VPN providers know exactly what services their users are accessing atall times. VPN providers are thus fully trusted parties even though they may not be trustworthy in practice.For example, users trust VPN providers to not keep any logs. However, this is rarely the case, as most VPN providers keep logs, even if they tell their users they do not. Worse, as VPN providers usually chargefor their services, the detailed history of each of their user’s online activities can be linked by VPN providersto personal data (legal name, address, credit card number, and so on) through the information disclosed inthe payment.

Recently, a number of decentralized VPNs (dVPNs) have been launched, such as Orchid and Sen-tinel. These designs successfully decentralize the single point of trust in the VPN provider to multipleVPN providers, but can still easily be deanonymized by network adversaries that watch the dVPN entryand exit points to correlate traffic; consequently, they do not offer the level of privacy needed for high-valueapplications. Nym can complement rather than compete with decentralized VPN providers, as a dVPN canprovide entry points to the Nym mixnet for users who want to conceal towards their local network the factthat they are using Nym. At the same time, Nym adds a layer of privacy to dVPNs that the VPN technologydoes not offer by itself.

With more than six thousand nodes and an estimated eight million daily users, Tor is currentlythe largest and most widely used anonymous overlay network. Tor is based ononion routing, a protocol where the client selects a set of nodes (typically three) and builds a multi-hop connection thatuses those nodes as a sequence of intermediate proxies. Clients encrypt data multiple times, each layer ofencryption corresponding to a node in the route. Each node then removes a layer of encryption and forwardsthe result to its successor in the route. In contrast to centralized VPN solutions, none of the Tor nodes by itself has visibility on both the network address of the client originating the traffic and the final destination:only the first node (guard) can see the client and only the last node (exit) can see the destination.

Even though Tor protects metadata much better than VPNs, it is designed to do so only against networkadversaries who have limited ability to monitor the entire network. Network adversaries that observeboththe traffic incoming and outgoing from Tor can perform end-to-end correlation attacks and deanonymizethe connection. Even when adversaries only have access to a client’s local connection,it is possible to identify web pages visited by the user via Tor through website fingerprinting attacks, whichexploit persistent and distinctive traffic patterns in web traffic that the Tor network leaves unaltered. These attacks are possible because even though onion routing cryptographically transforms data packetssuch that inputs and outputs are content-wise unlinkable, it maintains linkability for all the packets in aconnection and does not add timing obfuscation or cover traffic. As result, distinctive metadata patterns actas a traffic fingerprint that can be exploited to link connections end-to-end and deanonymize users.

Regarding the trust model, even though the Tor relays themselves are run by volunteers in a decen-tralized fashion, the Tor network includes semi-centralized trusted components, such as the directory andmeasurement authorities. The (currently ten) directory authorities are chosen and hard-coded by the Torsoftware developers, and they determine the list of Tor nodes that is distributed to clients to create their con-nections. Tor is thus a permissioned system in which all users must fully rely on these directory authoritiesto determine which nodes are part of the Tor network at any given time.

A mix network, ormixnet, is an overlay network of mix nodes that routes messages anonymously. Similarly to Tor, each packet relayed via a mixnet is encrypted multiple times and sent through a sequence of nodes, each of which removes a layer of encryption, until the last mix node sends the messageto its final destination. Differently from onion routing, however, mixnets route each individual messageindependently. Critically, what differentiates mixnets from Tor and peer-to-peer networks is that mixnetsare designed to provide metadata protection fromglobal network adversaries. Mix nodes achieve this byreordering the messages they route in addition to transforming them cryptographically. This makes mes-sages untraceable both in terms of appearance as well as timing. Mixnets thus provide stronger metadataprotection than Tor or any of its peer-to-peer alternatives. Mixnets did not take off the same way Tor did due to concerns over the cost and latency of bandwidth and public key operations that made the designseem impractical at the turn of the millennium when Tor was launched. Yet today, bandwidth and compu-tation are cheaper and faster than ever before and, given the scope of modern traffic analysis, mixnets lookincreasingly the best available option for achieving communication privacy.The mixnet concept was proposed by Chaum in the early 1980s and early deployments includethe Cypherpunk remailers (first developed by Eric Hughes and Hal Finney), Mixmaster and Mixmin-ion. Loopix is an advanced mixnet for anonymous email and instant messaging. Nym extends Loopix into a general-purpose incentivized mixnet architecture.

The participants of the Nym network are shown in Fig. 1. There are three types of nodes that make up the Nym infrastructure: validators, gateways, and mix nodes, whose functions are described next in this section. Third-party service providers can make themselves accessible via Nym to offer enhanced privacytoend users. Providers can also act as an interface between the Nym network and external componentsthat do not require modification or even awareness of Nym. For example, Nym can be used to anonymously broadcast Bitcoin transactions by means of a service provider that relays transactions received via the Nym mixnet to the Bitcoin peer-to-peer network.

End users. The user base of Nym includes the users of all the services available via Nym who choose tocommunicate privately, whether to anonymously broadcast a transaction, access information, or maintain amessaging conversation with a friend. The larger and more diverse the user base, the better the anonymityprovided to all users and the more cost-effective the network becomes.

Mix nodes. Mix nodes provision communication privacy to end users by relaying data packets anony-mously. Mix nodes are organized in a network, called mixnet, and packets traverse multiple nodes beforebeing delivered to their final recipient. Mix nodes receive data packets that they both (1) transform cryptographically and (2) reorder, such that it is not possible to tell which input packet corresponds to whichoutput, neither based on data content nor on timing. The Nym mixnet is based on the Loopix design: it uses the Sphinx packet format, a stratified network topology, continuous-time mixes, andloops of cover traffic. The Nym mixnet, includes further features forreliable transport, scalability, sybil protection, fair routing, quality-of-service measurements, incentives, andother modifications and extensions needed for real-world deployment.

Gateways. Gateways make the Nym mixnet accessible while protecting it from free riding. Participantsmay choose to always use the same gateway for all their traffic, split their traffic over multiple gateways, or pick a different gateway every day. Gateways also cache received messages for participants who areoffline or unreachable, and are instrumental in the implementation of reliable transport features.

Validators. Validators collaboratively perform several core functions in the Nym network. They maintain the Nym blockchain, which acts as a secure broadcast channel for distributing network-wide information, such as: the list of active nodes and their public keys, network configuration parameters, periodic randombeacons, participant’s stake, deposits into the nympool (the shared pool of funds used to support the Nymnetwork, described below), rewards distributed from the nympool, and any other data that needs to beavailable to all participants to ensure the secure operation of the network. In addition, validators issue credentials to participants in a distributed manner. Bandwidth credentials encode a proof of deposit in thenympool made in exchange for an allowance of data to send through the Nym mixnet. These credentials are shown to gateways to prove the right to send traffic through the mixnet.Service credentialscan encode arbitrary attributes required for proving "right to access" to a service, including proofs of having made adeposit in the nympool to pay for the service.

Service Providers. The Nym network is not a standalone service; it is an infrastructure that supportsprivacy for a broad range of third-party applications and services accessible through it. Service providerscan send and receive messages through the Nym network to privately communicate with their users, aswell as optionally use Nym service credentials for granting paid access to their services without requiring privacy-invasive user identification.

The NYM token is required by all actors to participate in the network, which will be fully operational at launch. In a nutshell, NYM rewards participation, helps prevent network abuse, and incentivizes thereliability and availability of the network as it scales up to meet growing demand.

Stakeholders are all participants holding NYM token, which translates to reputation used to selectwhich nodes actively contribute to the network. Following their preference and aptitude, some NYM stake-holders volunteer to operate mix nodes by pledging NYM token as their initial deposit while others review node statistics and characteristics to decide whether to support a node by delegating their stake to it, increas-ing its reputation and chance of being selected. Thus "staking" NYM refers to these actions: (1) setting upa node and pledging NYM, or (2) reviewing node characteristics and delegating NYM to an existing node.Nodes are then selected to operate in the network with likelihood proportional to their total stake (pledgedand delegated).

The NYM token is needed by users to privately communicate and access services via the Nym network. Yet exactly how payment is made to services and the Nym network itself by users depends on the serviceprovider. For example, a service provider may sponsor bandwidth in bulk for all its users so they can easilyaccess the service via the Nym network. Alternatively, users may pay an additional "privacy fee" similar toa Bitcoin transaction fee on an individual basis. While we expect some users to pay for access to the Nym network in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, users of Nym may continue to use traditional fiat relationships with their provider. Regardless of how payments are made, fees taken from deposits are converted to NYM in order to measure the demand for privacy and sustain the Nym network via rewards. Fees are collected inthe nympool over the reward interval and then distributed in the form of rewards at the end of the interval.

The NYM token is a cryptoasset necessary for the functioning of the Nym network. The token representsthe economic value the Nym network provides and provides a reward for nodes that provision the privacy generated by the Nym network. We do not envision NYM being used as a cryptocurrency outside the Nym network; its primary usage in aggregate is to balance the supply and demand for privacy given by the Nymnetwork. Nym users may continue to use fiat to pay for services; some advanced users will prefer to payfor services using cryptocurrencies that are already private. We do not wish to constrain how services may receive payment and any conditions they may have on payment, as it benefits the privacy of all to maximize the number of services and users on the Nym network. Again, Nym service credentials can be used as a “proof of payment" in Bitcoin, fiat, or any other cryptocurrency accepted by services; they can contain anyother additional information needed by service providers. Nym nodes may also wish to use their NYM tokens to obtain the resources necessary to maintain and increase their role in the network, and so Nym operators may chose to receive payment in Bitcoin or even another (possibly private) cryptocurrency ratherthan hold their reward in NYM token. The main function of the NYM token is not to be used, now or in thefuture, as a means of payment for acquiring goods or services, as well as a means of money or value transfer. The NYM token can be a means of payment to pay transactions fees, but only within the Nym network. Via using Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency for means of payment, Nym can support Bitcoin while using advancedfunctionality such as Liquid. This design also allows the Nym mixnet to be agnostic to any underlying blockchain and support the maximum number of services in order to maximize the privacy of all users.

As it can seen in Fig 2, some big investores have been investing in this project. Binance Labs, a16z, 1kx, Houbi Ventures, and many other good investors are invested in this project. This can help the project to get bigger and become one the best projects in the future.

The internet was once heralded as a great step forward in the co-evolution of humanity and technology.It was to provide universal access to information, establishing a planetary dialogue and the possibility ofcollective self-determination on a scale previously unimaginable. Instead, it is becoming the infrastructurefor a society of control. Metadata analysis is the linchpin in this process, as it can be even more predictivethan content analysis at anticipating – and thereby controlling – human behavior.

In tackling these challenges, Nym can provide the foundation for a secure and private internet, enablingusers to access services without being monitored and tracked. While Tor and p2p systems only aim toprotect against a weak threat model, mixnets can provide resistance against adversaries that have a godlike view of all the activity on the entire network. Although such adversaries once seemed perhaps too paranoid,the Snowden revelations have showed that the NSA has these capabilities. With the rise of big data andartificial intelligence, an ever-increasing number of actors can deploy these capabilities – ranging from small nation-states to commercial ventures and super-empowered individuals.

Privacy is key for the online security and freedom of everybody. But it was not built into the fabric of the internet. Your online activity leaks important metadata, even if your messages are encrypted. Your IP address, the device you use, who you talk to, when and where, are exposed. This can be exploited by eavesdroppers to undermine your security, or can be used in large scale network analysis for mass surveillance, undermining our freedom and autonomy.

TL;DR

Nym is setting off to change this and to transform the internet. There are three key components in the Nym ecosystem: a mixnet, anonymous credentials and a token.

A mixnet is a decentralized network of computers arranged in 3 layers. Your data is sent through it with added layers of encryption. In each layer of the mixnet, your data is mixed with other people’s data making them indistinguishable from each other and private on the internet.

With Nym credentials you can prove your right to access to digital services while retaining your privacy. From accessing public services, to complying with banking regulation, controlling who has access to your medical data, or participating in online voting.

And finally tokens help govern the long term sustainability and scalability of the Nym network.

If you want to know more about how NYM works, read below.

The most widely used means of improving network-level privacy are VPNs (Virtual Private Net-works). VPNs build an encrypted tunnel between a user’s client device and a centralized server run by aVPN provider, which acts as proxy that forwards the client’s communications. VPNs are often misconfig-ured in ways that compromise security and even when configured correctly, VPNs are trivial tomonitor and censor by adversaries with just local network access at the VPN server. Such network adver-saries can correlate traffic in and out of the VPN server to reveal the identity and destination of the VPNuser, as well as block the VPN from being accessible.

In terms of their trust model, VPN providers canfullyobserve all network traffic between their usersand the public internet, meaning that VPN providers know exactly what services their users are accessing atall times. VPN providers are thus fully trusted parties even though they may not be trustworthy in practice.For example, users trust VPN providers to not keep any logs. However, this is rarely the case, as most VPN providers keep logs, even if they tell their users they do not. Worse, as VPN providers usually chargefor their services, the detailed history of each of their user’s online activities can be linked by VPN providersto personal data (legal name, address, credit card number, and so on) through the information disclosed inthe payment.

Recently, a number of decentralized VPNs (dVPNs) have been launched, such as Orchid and Sen-tinel. These designs successfully decentralize the single point of trust in the VPN provider to multipleVPN providers, but can still easily be deanonymized by network adversaries that watch the dVPN entryand exit points to correlate traffic; consequently, they do not offer the level of privacy needed for high-valueapplications. Nym can complement rather than compete with decentralized VPN providers, as a dVPN canprovide entry points to the Nym mixnet for users who want to conceal towards their local network the factthat they are using Nym. At the same time, Nym adds a layer of privacy to dVPNs that the VPN technologydoes not offer by itself.

With more than six thousand nodes and an estimated eight million daily users, Tor is currentlythe largest and most widely used anonymous overlay network. Tor is based ononion routing, a protocol where the client selects a set of nodes (typically three) and builds a multi-hop connection thatuses those nodes as a sequence of intermediate proxies. Clients encrypt data multiple times, each layer ofencryption corresponding to a node in the route. Each node then removes a layer of encryption and forwardsthe result to its successor in the route. In contrast to centralized VPN solutions, none of the Tor nodes by itself has visibility on both the network address of the client originating the traffic and the final destination:only the first node (guard) can see the client and only the last node (exit) can see the destination.

Even though Tor protects metadata much better than VPNs, it is designed to do so only against networkadversaries who have limited ability to monitor the entire network. Network adversaries that observeboththe traffic incoming and outgoing from Tor can perform end-to-end correlation attacks and deanonymizethe connection. Even when adversaries only have access to a client’s local connection,it is possible to identify web pages visited by the user via Tor through website fingerprinting attacks, whichexploit persistent and distinctive traffic patterns in web traffic that the Tor network leaves unaltered. These attacks are possible because even though onion routing cryptographically transforms data packetssuch that inputs and outputs are content-wise unlinkable, it maintains linkability for all the packets in aconnection and does not add timing obfuscation or cover traffic. As result, distinctive metadata patterns actas a traffic fingerprint that can be exploited to link connections end-to-end and deanonymize users.

Regarding the trust model, even though the Tor relays themselves are run by volunteers in a decen-tralized fashion, the Tor network includes semi-centralized trusted components, such as the directory andmeasurement authorities. The (currently ten) directory authorities are chosen and hard-coded by the Torsoftware developers, and they determine the list of Tor nodes that is distributed to clients to create their con-nections. Tor is thus a permissioned system in which all users must fully rely on these directory authoritiesto determine which nodes are part of the Tor network at any given time.

A mix network, ormixnet, is an overlay network of mix nodes that routes messages anonymously. Similarly to Tor, each packet relayed via a mixnet is encrypted multiple times and sent through a sequence of nodes, each of which removes a layer of encryption, until the last mix node sends the messageto its final destination. Differently from onion routing, however, mixnets route each individual messageindependently. Critically, what differentiates mixnets from Tor and peer-to-peer networks is that mixnetsare designed to provide metadata protection fromglobal network adversaries. Mix nodes achieve this byreordering the messages they route in addition to transforming them cryptographically. This makes mes-sages untraceable both in terms of appearance as well as timing. Mixnets thus provide stronger metadataprotection than Tor or any of its peer-to-peer alternatives. Mixnets did not take off the same way Tor did due to concerns over the cost and latency of bandwidth and public key operations that made the designseem impractical at the turn of the millennium when Tor was launched. Yet today, bandwidth and compu-tation are cheaper and faster than ever before and, given the scope of modern traffic analysis, mixnets lookincreasingly the best available option for achieving communication privacy.The mixnet concept was proposed by Chaum in the early 1980s and early deployments includethe Cypherpunk remailers (first developed by Eric Hughes and Hal Finney), Mixmaster and Mixmin-ion. Loopix is an advanced mixnet for anonymous email and instant messaging. Nym extends Loopix into a general-purpose incentivized mixnet architecture.

The participants of the Nym network are shown in Fig. 1. There are three types of nodes that make up the Nym infrastructure: validators, gateways, and mix nodes, whose functions are described next in this section. Third-party service providers can make themselves accessible via Nym to offer enhanced privacytoend users. Providers can also act as an interface between the Nym network and external componentsthat do not require modification or even awareness of Nym. For example, Nym can be used to anonymously broadcast Bitcoin transactions by means of a service provider that relays transactions received via the Nym mixnet to the Bitcoin peer-to-peer network.

End users. The user base of Nym includes the users of all the services available via Nym who choose tocommunicate privately, whether to anonymously broadcast a transaction, access information, or maintain amessaging conversation with a friend. The larger and more diverse the user base, the better the anonymityprovided to all users and the more cost-effective the network becomes.

Mix nodes. Mix nodes provision communication privacy to end users by relaying data packets anony-mously. Mix nodes are organized in a network, called mixnet, and packets traverse multiple nodes beforebeing delivered to their final recipient. Mix nodes receive data packets that they both (1) transform cryptographically and (2) reorder, such that it is not possible to tell which input packet corresponds to whichoutput, neither based on data content nor on timing. The Nym mixnet is based on the Loopix design: it uses the Sphinx packet format, a stratified network topology, continuous-time mixes, andloops of cover traffic. The Nym mixnet, includes further features forreliable transport, scalability, sybil protection, fair routing, quality-of-service measurements, incentives, andother modifications and extensions needed for real-world deployment.

Gateways. Gateways make the Nym mixnet accessible while protecting it from free riding. Participantsmay choose to always use the same gateway for all their traffic, split their traffic over multiple gateways, or pick a different gateway every day. Gateways also cache received messages for participants who areoffline or unreachable, and are instrumental in the implementation of reliable transport features.

Validators. Validators collaboratively perform several core functions in the Nym network. They maintain the Nym blockchain, which acts as a secure broadcast channel for distributing network-wide information, such as: the list of active nodes and their public keys, network configuration parameters, periodic randombeacons, participant’s stake, deposits into the nympool (the shared pool of funds used to support the Nymnetwork, described below), rewards distributed from the nympool, and any other data that needs to beavailable to all participants to ensure the secure operation of the network. In addition, validators issue credentials to participants in a distributed manner. Bandwidth credentials encode a proof of deposit in thenympool made in exchange for an allowance of data to send through the Nym mixnet. These credentials are shown to gateways to prove the right to send traffic through the mixnet.Service credentialscan encode arbitrary attributes required for proving "right to access" to a service, including proofs of having made adeposit in the nympool to pay for the service.

Service Providers. The Nym network is not a standalone service; it is an infrastructure that supportsprivacy for a broad range of third-party applications and services accessible through it. Service providerscan send and receive messages through the Nym network to privately communicate with their users, aswell as optionally use Nym service credentials for granting paid access to their services without requiring privacy-invasive user identification.

The NYM token is required by all actors to participate in the network, which will be fully operational at launch. In a nutshell, NYM rewards participation, helps prevent network abuse, and incentivizes thereliability and availability of the network as it scales up to meet growing demand.

Stakeholders are all participants holding NYM token, which translates to reputation used to selectwhich nodes actively contribute to the network. Following their preference and aptitude, some NYM stake-holders volunteer to operate mix nodes by pledging NYM token as their initial deposit while others review node statistics and characteristics to decide whether to support a node by delegating their stake to it, increas-ing its reputation and chance of being selected. Thus "staking" NYM refers to these actions: (1) setting upa node and pledging NYM, or (2) reviewing node characteristics and delegating NYM to an existing node.Nodes are then selected to operate in the network with likelihood proportional to their total stake (pledgedand delegated).

The NYM token is needed by users to privately communicate and access services via the Nym network. Yet exactly how payment is made to services and the Nym network itself by users depends on the serviceprovider. For example, a service provider may sponsor bandwidth in bulk for all its users so they can easilyaccess the service via the Nym network. Alternatively, users may pay an additional "privacy fee" similar toa Bitcoin transaction fee on an individual basis. While we expect some users to pay for access to the Nym network in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, users of Nym may continue to use traditional fiat relationships with their provider. Regardless of how payments are made, fees taken from deposits are converted to NYM in order to measure the demand for privacy and sustain the Nym network via rewards. Fees are collected inthe nympool over the reward interval and then distributed in the form of rewards at the end of the interval.

The NYM token is a cryptoasset necessary for the functioning of the Nym network. The token representsthe economic value the Nym network provides and provides a reward for nodes that provision the privacy generated by the Nym network. We do not envision NYM being used as a cryptocurrency outside the Nym network; its primary usage in aggregate is to balance the supply and demand for privacy given by the Nymnetwork. Nym users may continue to use fiat to pay for services; some advanced users will prefer to payfor services using cryptocurrencies that are already private. We do not wish to constrain how services may receive payment and any conditions they may have on payment, as it benefits the privacy of all to maximize the number of services and users on the Nym network. Again, Nym service credentials can be used as a “proof of payment" in Bitcoin, fiat, or any other cryptocurrency accepted by services; they can contain anyother additional information needed by service providers. Nym nodes may also wish to use their NYM tokens to obtain the resources necessary to maintain and increase their role in the network, and so Nym operators may chose to receive payment in Bitcoin or even another (possibly private) cryptocurrency ratherthan hold their reward in NYM token. The main function of the NYM token is not to be used, now or in thefuture, as a means of payment for acquiring goods or services, as well as a means of money or value transfer. The NYM token can be a means of payment to pay transactions fees, but only within the Nym network. Via using Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency for means of payment, Nym can support Bitcoin while using advancedfunctionality such as Liquid. This design also allows the Nym mixnet to be agnostic to any underlying blockchain and support the maximum number of services in order to maximize the privacy of all users.

As it can seen in Fig 2, some big investores have been investing in this project. Binance Labs, a16z, 1kx, Houbi Ventures, and many other good investors are invested in this project. This can help the project to get bigger and become one the best projects in the future.

The internet was once heralded as a great step forward in the co-evolution of humanity and technology.It was to provide universal access to information, establishing a planetary dialogue and the possibility ofcollective self-determination on a scale previously unimaginable. Instead, it is becoming the infrastructurefor a society of control. Metadata analysis is the linchpin in this process, as it can be even more predictivethan content analysis at anticipating – and thereby controlling – human behavior.

In tackling these challenges, Nym can provide the foundation for a secure and private internet, enablingusers to access services without being monitored and tracked. While Tor and p2p systems only aim toprotect against a weak threat model, mixnets can provide resistance against adversaries that have a godlike view of all the activity on the entire network. Although such adversaries once seemed perhaps too paranoid,the Snowden revelations have showed that the NSA has these capabilities. With the rise of big data andartificial intelligence, an ever-increasing number of actors can deploy these capabilities – ranging from small nation-states to commercial ventures and super-empowered individuals.