EFPIX: A zero-trust encrypted flood protocol

TL;DR

EFPIX addresses the need for private, censorship-resistant communication in environments where central servers are infeasible. It proposes a flood-based, zero-trust protocol that achieves end-to-end encryption while hiding sender/receiver metadata and resisting infrastructure failures. The paper details the encoding/decoding workflow, deduplication, PoW-based spam resistance, and a threat model, comparing its properties to related protocols. The approach enables resilient, asynchronous messaging for space, disaster, and privacy-critical use cases, with explicit anonymity-performance trade-offs.

Abstract

We propose EFPIX (Encrypted Flood Protocol for Information eXchange), a flood-based relay communication protocol that achieves end-to-end encryption, plausible deniability for users, and untraceable messages while hiding metadata, such as sender and receiver, from those not involved. It also has built-in spam resistance and multiple optional enhancements. It can be used in privacy-critical communication, infrastructure-loss scenarios, space/research/military communication, where central servers are infeasible, or general-purpose messaging.

Figures (2)

• Figure 1: Message encoding process
• Figure 2: Message decoding and relay process