The jitter-vs-clock verdict rested on handing the clock adversary the tick
schedule, which is the conservative choice but also the harsher one -- a real
observer sees only ticks that released something. Rather than assume, both are
now measurable, and they are provably equivalent.
A silent tick implies nothing was pending at it, and any arrival older than the
previous release has demonstrably already left. So the candidate window bounded by
the true previous tick and the one bounded by the previous observed release hold
the same arrivals. Confirmed identical to 1e-9 in both the sparse regime (one hold
per relay) and the dense one (56 holds per relay), where the two coincide for
different reasons.
That removes the objection to the comparison: jitter beats the clock at a matched
delay budget on merit, not because the clock was given a stronger opponent.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Caught by the test immediately: key() enumerates every SimConfig field, so
min_blend_delay and release_mode needed alternative values.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two release designs at a MATCHED delay budget, so they differ only in how they
delay: clock (batch at free-running ticks, the existing model) and jitter (each
message waits its own exponential draw, mean set equal to the clock residual).
Plus min_blend_delay, which forbids intervals shorter than it.
Minimum interval -- a negative result, and provably so. A zero-length gap is
instantaneous, so it never covers an arrival and is never sampled by the residual
or by the size-biased interval. Excluding it therefore leaves the mean hold
exactly unchanged, and with it blending and linkability; what it does change is
E[S], the gap between release opportunities. Confirmed analytically and in
simulation: 1.168s vs 1.167s at M=3.
Timing attack -- the effective anonymity set of a release (perplexity of the
observer posterior over which arrival produced it), plus MAP success, the chance
its single best guess is right. The second matters because perplexity flatters a
heavy tail: an exponential never fully excludes an old arrival, so it can look
unlinkable while still being guessed correctly.
At the baseline rate BOTH designs fail almost completely -- MAP success 0.98-0.99,
effective set ~1. A relay handles so little traffic that in->out matching is
trivial, which follows directly from the mixing~0 result. Traffic, not delay, is
what buys timing protection.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
full_deanon counted any sender with an adversarial peer as identified. Capturing a
cascade tells the adversary WHICH message it is following, not WHO started it:
seeing an honest X transmit is equally consistent with X having received it from a
peer the adversary cannot watch. Separating the two gives
confidence = 1/(2 - a/d) = d/(2d - a)
for a adversarial peers of degree d. The path length does not enter -- the
conditioning event already fixes the relays as adversarial, so an honest X is not
one of them for this message.
The consequence is large. One peer of eight is worth 0.53, barely above the 0.5
prior, and 90% confidence needs a >= 8: every peer, which is the ECLIPSE condition
rather than the observation condition. Measured, attributable_frac_90 equals
eclipsed_frac exactly. At f_adv = 0.2, degree 8 that is 2.6e-6 against an
observed_frac of 0.83 -- the published figure overstates confident origination by
five orders of magnitude.
Stated in the report as a bracket rather than a replacement: full_deanon is the
upper bound on adversary capability, this is the lower bound, and the truth lies
between because the adversary also learns from the sender neighbourhood. Closing
that gap needs a k-hop observability model and is recorded as open in section 5.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The study started as a peering-degree question and grew well past it: propagation,
adversary exposure, deanonymization and time-to-link, reliability under uniform
and correlated churn, messaging redundancy, and cover traffic. The pd name no
longer describes it.
tools/simulators/blend/pd/ -> tools/simulators/blend/, package src/pd -> src/blend,
and reports/blend/pd/ -> reports/blend/. Moved with git mv so history follows.
The text substitutions are deliberately narrow. pd is also the conventional pandas
alias, and pandas genuinely has a pd.plotting submodule, so a blanket pd. -> blend.
rewrite would have corrupted four files. Only package-unambiguous forms were
changed: from pd.X, -m pd.X, pd.<our module>, PD_BYTES_BUDGET, src/pd, and the
pyproject name. All four import pandas as pd lines are untouched and verified.
Both READMEs reframed: peering degree is now presented as the primary axis that
ties the others together rather than as the subject, and the relative links, which
lost a directory level in the move, are corrected.
Verified after the move: ruff clean, 101 tests, 45 verify anchors, make targets,
the script shims, an end-to-end smoke run, and data/report_numbers.py still
reproducing the report tables from the checked-in evidence.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
