About Quilibrium and Components

Level 1: Communication

Imagine our tree house club wanted to talk to other tree house clubs, how would we do it? Most of us have played the telephone game with tin cans and string, so imagine if you and all your friends set up a bunch of strings across the tree houses – now you can all talk to each other! Suddenly you can play games across the forts – Battleship, go fish, anything you can communicate.

But what if another tree house decided to attach a hidden string to your line and listen in? You write a secret codewords book, and give a unique one to each of the forts you want to communicate with – that way, only they can talk to you, anyone trying to listen in can't make sense of it. But games are often unique, and even if they don't know that CRAB PILOT BISCUIT BANJO = "you sunk my battleship!", they can pick up on your communication patterns to figure out what you're talking about, especially if those code words don't change with every use! So, you do two things: you make your codewords book really big (bigger than you'll ever need!), and you have a special word that says "this is the actual end of my message", then you fill in your message with extra random words so that every message you send over the tin can is exactly the same length. Now, nobody can tell what you're talking about.

But they do know who you're talking to, and when! So let's solve that problem. First, let's take our original message: we know who we want to send it to, but we want others to not know this. So we create a brand new word, totally unique to our tree house and the destination, that helps our friends find our message. Then, we take our message that we translated by codewords for the recipient, put this special destination on it, like putting an address on an envelope, and then use another set of codewords, for another tree house, to translate all of this again. We do this a few times, using the destination of the previous tree house as the new address, like putting an envelope inside another envelope, but with words. Now it has a final resting spot, that only our tree house and the intended tree house knows how to find. The intended tree house comes up with their own brand new word, also unique to our tree house and theirs, so that nobody can try to watch where messages "meet in the middle" to figure out who is talking to whom (Envelope Encryption/Onion Routing).

Reference

• "ELI5: Quilibrium" on Paragraph, 17 May 2024 - https://paragraph.xyz/@quilibrium.com/eli5-quilibrium