Penum is a decentralized transport privacy protocol designed to decouple the identity of a sender from the final destination of their traffic.
Tagline: Penum — Privacy through partial visibility.
Penum achieves privacy by ensuring that no single participant in the network possesses sufficient information to reconstruct the full path of a packet. By decomposing knowledge across multiple hops, the protocol prevents any individual component from knowing both the initiator of the traffic and its ultimate destination.
The protocol is designed for systems engineers and network designers who require a robust, honest-but-curious resistant transport layer without the complexity or overhead of legacy onion routing implementations.
An interoperable v1 Penum implementation must include:
- Client: Implements path selection, onion-layered encryption, and packet construction.
- Entry Relay: Accepts packets from Clients and forwards them to Middle Relays. Knows (Sender, Next-Hop).
- Middle Relay: Accepts packets from Entry/Middle Relays and forwards them to Exit Gateways. Knows (Prev-Hop, Next-Hop).
- Exit Gateway: Accepts packets from Middle Relays and forwards them to the final destination. Knows (Prev-Hop, Destination).
Each relay must operate according to the rules defined in relay-rules.md.