> Private message routing is, effectively, a two-hop onion packet routing.
And actually, it's even better than that:
> Private message routing routes packets (each message is one 16kb packet), not sockets. Unlike Tor and VPN, it does not create circuits between your client and destination servers. The forwarding server creates one shared session between itself and the destination, and forwards all messages from you and other clients to that destination server, mixing messages from many clients into a single TCP session.
> As each message uses its own random encryption key and random (non-sequential) identifier, the destination server cannot link multiple message queue addresses to the same client. At the same time, the forwarding server cannot observe which (and how many) addresses on the destination server your client sends messages to, thanks to e2e encryption between the client and destination server. In that regard, this design is similar to onion routing, but with per-packet anonymity, not per-circuit.
> This design is similar to mixnets (e.g. Nym network), and it is tailored to the needs of message routing, providing better transport anonymity than general-purpose networks, like Tor or VPN. You still can use Tor or VPN to connect to known servers, to protect your IP address from them.
> SimpleX does not.
https://simplex.chat/faq/
> Private message routing is, effectively, a two-hop onion packet routing.
And actually, it's even better than that:
> Private message routing routes packets (each message is one 16kb packet), not sockets. Unlike Tor and VPN, it does not create circuits between your client and destination servers. The forwarding server creates one shared session between itself and the destination, and forwards all messages from you and other clients to that destination server, mixing messages from many clients into a single TCP session.
> As each message uses its own random encryption key and random (non-sequential) identifier, the destination server cannot link multiple message queue addresses to the same client. At the same time, the forwarding server cannot observe which (and how many) addresses on the destination server your client sends messages to, thanks to e2e encryption between the client and destination server. In that regard, this design is similar to onion routing, but with per-packet anonymity, not per-circuit.
> This design is similar to mixnets (e.g. Nym network), and it is tailored to the needs of message routing, providing better transport anonymity than general-purpose networks, like Tor or VPN. You still can use Tor or VPN to connect to known servers, to protect your IP address from them.