Hello everyone, welcome back to another edition of Tachyon’s technical guide. Here we explore different aspects of Tachyon’s architecture. We have already reviewed Tachyon Booster UDP (which is the core of Tachyon’s ecosystem) and Tachyon Security Protocol (which ensures that Tachyon’s ecosystem remains secure).

In this article we will explain Tachyon Anti-Analysis (TAA), the third tier of Tachyon’s protocol suite. When it comes to decentralized networks, it’s easier for hackers to monitor the entire network communication and attack an individual node through which information is being routed. Once the node is compromised, the attacker can potentially access the entire data and disrupt the communication channel.

TAA is responsible for ensuring that data transmission happens in such a manner which makes it almost impossible for a potential hacker to track the network communication or access the transmitted message in its entirety. This is achieved through 2 mechanisms — Concurrent Multi-path Routing Scheme and Multi-Relay Forwarding Scheme.

Concurrent Multi-path Routing Scheme

In concurrent multi-path routing, the message is broken into smaller data packets and routed to the destination address through multiple pathways simultaneously. This obscures the entire connection route. The packets can arrive at the client’s address in any order, where they are re-assembled in the proper order to retrieve the original information.

To explain this in a bit more details, let’s assume that the user is sending message(A). The message will be broken down into IP packet(A1), IP packet(A2)… IP packet(A5). In each IP packet(n), the Head will form a tree structure where information A is the parent node. The SHA-256 hash result of Information(A) will be used as the IP Packet index to form this tree.

The IP packets will be routed through different proxy servers Proxy(S1), Proxy(S2)… Proxy(S5) till they reach the Tachyon client node. Once the client receives all the IP packets, it can use the IP packet index to retrieve the original message(A) in its entirety.

Even if the attacker manages to compromise a single node, he can only acquire a portion of the information and not the entire message. As the number of nodes in Tachyon’s network keeps on increasing, the difficulty any attacker faces in intercepting the entire communication will increase in an exponential manner.

Multi-Relay Forwarding Scheme

Multi-relay forwarding scheme is based on Onion routing, which is a well-known technique used for anonymous communication over computer networks. In this scheme, data packets are forwarded with multiple encryptions through short relays, so that no intermediate node can figure out the forwarding content or the routing path. As a result, even if a node in the communication channel is compromised, the attacker has no means to determine the actual communication channel and track the information being transmitted.

Let’s take a look at how this scheme works. Suppose node A wants to send a message to node D, with B and C being intermediate nodes. A will encrypt the message with D’s public key and put it in an envelope marked D. However, instead of sending the envelope to D directly, A will encrypt the envelope with C’s public key and encrypt it as a message to C. Thereafter, A will put this message in an envelope marked C, but once again, instead of sending it to C, A will encrypt it with B’s public key as a message to B.

Finally, A will send this message to B. On its part, B will decrypt the message, retrieve the envelope marked C, and forward it to C. Once again, C will decrypt the message and forward the encrypted envelope to D. Finally, D will decrypt the message and reconstruct the original message from A.

In order to find out that node A is sending messages to node D, an attacker has to compromise both node B and node C simultaneously. Similar to concurrent multi-path routing, multi-relay forwarding also ensures that taking over a single node in the network doesn’t compromise the entire communication channel. And more the quantity of nodes in the network, lesser is the probability of a successful attack.

With this we complete our foray into the technical side of Tachyon’s architecture. But stay tuned, we have much more enthralling content waiting for you guys. Don’t forget to check out our whitepaper for more information. Keep following our Medium account for more such insights into Tachyon Protocol.