@sanaz Thank you for the post :).
1
Yes. I fully agree. This post was more like a dump of my current thoughts.
I will comment on your forum post on the anonymity of Waku-Relay, too.
I also agree that it makes sense to have a first post on the research log that focuses on the relay protocol.
Here, I was aiming at a more general Wakuv2 threat model. While focusing on request response protocols for now, I would also include discovery protocols later on.
2
For a messaging protocol, I would assume that our latency requirement are not as strict as for interactive web session.
This in turn, would allow us leveraging mix-nets like Nym and get stronger anonymity properties than Tor.
3
An attacker that controls an entire autonomous system. For instance a malicious ISP.
4
See 1.
An series of research log post breaking down the threats versus each of the protocols starting with relay would be a nice, imo.
(This is in line with your second comment that I just read ;))
Yet, I still think, a comprehensive threat model (including ambient peer discovery) should be the future goal.
There might be attacks that combine weaknesses in several protocols.
I think this was also the initial plan when we wanted to compare Tor with Waku.
I was just planning to introduce the Tor attacker model, and look at threats vs Waku within this model.
Tor and Waku have different purposes.
Imo, giving an overview over the differences (both technical and from a use-case point of view),
and explaining why Waku can achieve stronger anonymity properties (if we accept higher latency), should be enough.
You could post your existing work here on the research log.
This allows reader to get an overview over Tor, and understand the differences.
I would stress that Tor’s main purpose is anonymous web browsing (incl. downloads and interactive sessions), while Waku’s main purpose is messaging. These purposes pose different restriction on the design, which reflect in their security/privacy/anonymity models.
For current/future work, I would rather focus on the Wakuv2 threat model.