A length-invariant hybrid mix

Abstract

This paper presents a secure and flexible Mix-net that has the following properties; it efficiently handles long plaintexts that exceed the modulus size of underlying public-key encryption as well as very short ones (length-flexible), input ciphertext length is not impacted by the number of mix-servers (length-invariant), and its security in terms of anonymity is proven in a formal way (provably secure). One can also add robustness i.e. it outputs correct results in the presence of corrupt servers. The security is proved in the random oracle model by showing a reduction from breaking the anonymity of our Mix-net to breaking a sort of indistinguishability of the underlying symmetric encryption scheme or solving the Decision Diffie-Hellman problem.