Statistical privacy-preserving message dissemination for peer-to-peer networks

Abstract: Concerns for the privacy of communication is widely discussed in research and overall society. For the public financial infrastructure of blockchains, this discussion encompasses the privacy of transaction data and its broadcasting throughout the network. To tackle this problem, we transform a discrete-time protocol for contact networks over infinite trees into a computer network protocol for peer-to-peer networks. Peer-to-peer networks are modeled as organically growing graphs. We show that the distribution of shortest paths in such a network can be modeled using a normal distribution $\mathcal{N}(\mu,\sigma^2).$ We determine statistical estimators for $\mu,\sigma$ via multivariate models. The model behaves logarithmic over the number of nodes n and proportional to an inverse exponential over the number of added edges k. These results facilitate the computation of optimal forwarding probabilities during the dissemination phase for optimal privacy in a limited information environment.