The right to privacy is deterred by the intelligence-driven nature of digital communications where most services and applications are profiting from data collection of its users, and it undermines the personal space that everyone is entitled to.
Oxen Privacy Tech Foundation, OPTF for short, is a non-profit organization set in Australia who makes their mission to restore the right to privacy for everyone through developing projects that are meant to make digital interactions secure and private.
OPTF wants to “build open-source secure communication tools that are free and accessible” because they believe privacy and security tools should be readily available to the public in defense of protecting democratic principles like freedom of speech.
One of those projects is Oxen which is a blockchain network layer that serves as the foundation for the organization’s encrypted messenger called Session, an anonymity network called Lokinet, and for a private cryptocurrency also called Oxen. All of these projects individually make a different aspect of digital interactions secure and private from surveillance actors.
Kee Jefferys is the chief technical officer at Oxen, an independent subsidiary of OPTF, and he oversees the projects that make up the Oxen ecosystem of privacy-oriented technologies. For clarification, Oxen is the primary company that develops and manages the projects and OPTF serves as the funding source for Oxen.
“OPTF is supposed to have some independence from the main company, which develops Session and Oxen. If we go rogue, or we stop providing services that are good for the OPTF, they can go hire someone else to continue the vision of working on Oxen and Session.”
Oxen was the first project that was developed and it is a privacy-focused cryptocurrency that hides where transactions are being sent to and how much of it is being sent. Shortly described, cryptocurrencies are digital financial assets that are openly traded as legitimate currency.
Oxen is a branch of another private coin known as Monero with both coins improving on the lack of privacy that public blockchain cryptocurrencies have which is the ability to see everyone’s transaction logs. With coins like Oxen, it makes transactions untraceable on both ends of the sender and the recipient.
Unlike Monero, Oxen uses a “proof of stake system” in place of traditional mining which is more environmentally friendly as mining for crypto coins is known to draw vast amounts of energy resources. Oxen also has faster transaction times than Monero thanks to Blink, a payment mechanism that allows for near-instant transactions within “the blink of an eye.”
Lokinet is a decentralized anonymity network that makes user internet activity private and secure. It routes internet traffic through several different nodes before it reaches its destination, known as onion-routing, so that it becomes untraceable to the users of the network, and all traffic is encrypted to prevent all parties on the network from reading the user’s web content.
Kee describes Lokinet as a “low-latency onion router” similar to Tor, but more capable of the kinds of data that can be sent through it because it operates at a network layer. This makes Lokinet suitable for everyday applications that require stable internet connectivity such as voice and video calls which would not be reliable on Tor.
Lokinet thrives from the communal-ran nodes that make up over 1800 nodes operating across the globe. With international nodes that can be ran by anyone, this ensures that the network can grow in size, but also is what makes the network anonymous because there is no central entity that is controlling the flow of internet traffic.
As previously said, the Oxen Blockchain serves as the basis for Lokinet since users who run nodes are financially incentivized to maintain their nodes by being rewarded with Oxen. Users first stake a set amount of Oxen in order to run or contribute in running a node, and overtime they will get a return back.
To prevent a malicious actor from setting up too many service nodes in an attempt to trace back messages, known as a Sybil attack, there is a financial barrier in setting up nodes. Operators must temporarily give up 15,000 Oxen to run a node, and it prevents bad actors from having a firm grasp on Lokinet.
Out of all of the projects Oxen has developed, most people have come to known Oxen by their private messenger called Session. “Our biggest product by far in terms of users is Session” said Kee, “And that’s probably the one that most have heard of.”
Session is a private messenger that primarily focuses on the removal of metadata in all stages of the message being sent and received. Metadata is the sub-information that makes messages traceable despite mechanisms being in placed such as encryption which could be thwarted if metadata is present.
“Metadata is generally everything that is associated with a message that is not actually the message itself," he said. "There's just a litany of data that can be collected at that point by the centralized server that is not the message itself, but it's everything around that.”
Metadata can exist as identifiers such as IP addresses which is a digital identity on a network, the timestamps of messages being sent and received, the account names behind the participants, geolocation data, and much more.
Session removes practically all metadata associated with messages in-part due to it running on the Oxen Service Node Network that makes up Lokinet. Similar to how Lokinet works, a message is sent through several different decentralized nodes before reaching its destination which provides anonymity in protecting user IP addresses.
Metadata protection also exists when registering for Session as no phone number or email is required to sign-up because those also act as identifiers that can compromise the identity behind users.
Encryption is standard in private messengers like Session, but metadata protection is what highlights Session from the rest.
“It takes that privacy enhancement to the next level. And that's in line with the OPTF’s mission as an organization which is a human rights mission to be able to give people who are in restrictive countries access to free communications without worrying about being snooped on.”
OPTF has a directive on providing applications that are metadata-free because there aren’t protections for it in many private-oriented services. “I think you can’t avoid metadata. When you're talking about privacy, it's probably the biggest thing that hasn't been explored.”
Kee says that encryption “was a really good start” in protecting user privacy, but the second step should be in protecting metadata as well. However, metadata protection isn’t as easy as applying encryption because there is no true way to avoid its generation.
“Metadata exists naturally in the construction of the internet. And there isn't really a super simple way to get around it.”
Despite this, the team at Oxen is taking metadata seriously by designing their projects to be metadata resistant. This can be seen with the structure of how Oxen, Lokinet, and Session all work together.
Oxen is designed to have private transactions that cannot be traced, Lokinet is built to onion-route all internet traffic to provide anonymity, and so does Session with onion-routing messages and also not requiring a phone number for account registration. All three are made to remove links to its users.
“I think the OPTF has a really clear mandate to look at metadata seriously, and that’s what we’re doing in our products as well.”
The Oxen privacy ecosystem was made to give back data privacy and security to the everyday individual which has been massively intruded by government agencies and corporations all over the world.
Kee says that surveillance in the modern age is putting many people potentially at risk of threat due to the collection of data and analytics that most applications and services regularly collect. Although this data is mostly collected for advertising purposes, the data itself may also be shared with entities that seek to use the data for self-centered and malicious intentions.
“It's more about what happens when we create all of that data, it doesn't just end up in the hands of advertisers, it also ends up in the hands of rogue states. I think it has a wide range of consequences that you can't necessarily see on the surface.”
Groups of individuals like whistleblowers, journalists, and human rights activists are subjected to be more surveilled on than most others, especially in countries where public activism is limited, and they need to equip themselves with the right tools to mitigate surveillance acts.
Lokinet in particular can help activists keep their online research and reporting anonymous from rogue entities that will try to monitor and stop their activities. An activist browsing the internet without an IP protection tool makes their internet service provider “aware that they're actually accessing information that might not be sanctioned in that country.”
People in restrictive countries like China would benefit from tools like Session that make messaging secure from government monitors that not only track what someone is saying, but also censor out certain phrases or words that have been blacklisted.
However, China’s Great Firewall has become very effective against intercepting and blocking network requests made by privacy tools like Session which are necessary to use the apps as intended. With blocked requests, it will definitely hinder the ability to use that service.
Fortunately, OPTF will do their best “within its resources” to be able to provide free and open communications in restrictive countries. It is a conjoint effort for OPTF to make Session a secure messenger, and then have other groups develop firewall circumvention tools in order to allow people in restrictive countries to use the apps they want to use.
Whether an individual resides in a nation that has freedom of speech or is in one that doesn’t, there is a clear need for privacy tools that will evade government surveillance and act upon stopping data collection from rogue entities.
Free to use services provided by companies like Meta, previously known as Facebook, and Google have “an inherent advantage to companies that are trying to build private technologies” like Oxen because data collection allows a company to better their services in every way.
Meta and Google build products that are easy to use and are very convenient because of the links they are able to establish from data analytics. Social media apps have the ability to recommend accounts together that potentially have a real-life friend relationship because of information like shared phone number contacts that these companies are freely and regularly collecting.
Kee suggests that most people should be willing to “sacrifice some of the usability things they get from non-private applications” in favor of using privacy-centric ones. Switching to a privacy app does have some tradeoffs with most notably the user interface design being not as polished as popular apps or not offering the same level of convenience, but there are distinct advantages.
Privacy apps don’t collect data from its users, and it keeps personal communications secure from those who do want an inside look at people’s lives.
The projects developed by Oxen offer metadata protection and encryption to ensure that one’s personal life stays private as it should be because privacy is a fundamental human right, and it is a right that should not be easily neglected in the digital world of today.
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