Draughts: A Jump-Based Anonymous Communication System without Global Knowledge and with Built-In Anonymous Replies

Current mainstream anonymous communication systems face a fundamental trade-off: onion routing’s long-lived circuits are vulnerable to traffic analysis, while mixnets’ reliance on a global network knowledge hinders scalability. We propose Draughts, a system that resolves this dilemma through a decentralized, hop-by-hop routing model. Extending Jump routing, Draughts’s key innovations are twofold: it replaces global state dependency with local two-hop neighbor knowledge, and enables anonymous replies by embedding a commutatively encrypted initiator address in forward packets. Our evaluation shows that Draughts achieves sender anonymity on par with global-knowledge systems and remains robust against global passive traffic analysis, with latency and anonymity stable as the network scales, affirming its viability for large-scale, interactive applications.