I read the TorCoin/TorPath paper yesterday, and looked at some of the references including CoinShuffle[1] (a bitcoin mixing protocol) and Dissent[2] (implementa

I read the TorCoin/TorPath paper yesterday, and looked at some of the references including CoinShuffle[1] (a bitcoin mixing protocol) and Dissent[2] (implementation of a DC-net or Dining Cryptographer's net, 2nd great invention by David Chaum after RSA blinding/anonymous e-cash). I'll summarize what I learned here, hopefully someone will find it useful. One of the key pieces seems to be the Neff shuffle (verifiable random shuffling of an ordered list of public keys). The Neff shuffle builds on ElGamal pairs (which themselves are the core algorithm in the verifiable voting system helios[3]). Dissent looks to be the application of a Neff shuffling technique to ferret out the malicious nodes in a DC-net (a provably anonymous communication network). CoinShuffle is basically the use of a DC-net to anonymously pool together a set of bitcoin public keys, and the coinShuffle prototype is a fork of the Dissent codebase. The TorCoin protocol specifies using anonymous or mixed bitcoin transactions (such as by using CoinShuffle or ZeroCoin). And tying it all back together, in the TorPath protocol we again find Neff shuffling, used by the assignment servers to generate provably-random Tor relay circuits from groups of relays. 1. http://crypsys.mmci.uni-saarland.de/projects/CoinShuffle/ http://crypsys.mmci.uni-saarland.de/projects/CoinShuffle/ 2. http://dedis.cs.yale.edu/dissent/ http://dedis.cs.yale.edu/dissent/ 3. https://vote.heliosvoting.org https://vote.heliosvoting.org