Mix network
A mix network is like a big secret party where no one knows who anyone else is. Imagine you have a secret message you want to send to your friend. You don't want anyone else to see the message or know who it's from or who it's going to. So you wrap the message up in a bunch of different boxes and give each box to a different person at the party. Each person opens the box they were given, but they don't look inside. They just take out a piece of paper that has instructions on it for what to do with the box next.
Maybe the instruction says to pass the box to the person wearing a hat, or to the person who came from the farthest away. Or maybe the instruction says to open the box and take out one of the smaller boxes inside and pass that to someone else. Whatever the instruction is, the person follows it and then passes the box on to the next person.
After the box has gone through a bunch of people, it ends up at a special room where all the boxes get opened and the message inside is put back together again. But no one at the party knows who the message was sent from or who it was sent to, because everyone just did what their piece of paper told them to do.
A mix network works in a similar way. It takes your message and splits it up into little pieces called packets. Each packet gets sent to a different server in the network, and each server just looks at the address on the packet and sends it on to the next server according to a set of rules. Those rules might say to wait a certain amount of time before sending the packet, or to route it to a specific server based on the address.
Eventually, all the packets get reassembled at the end of the network and your message comes out the other side. But because each packet went through so many different servers and was handled by so many different people, no one knows who sent the message or who it was sent to.
Maybe the instruction says to pass the box to the person wearing a hat, or to the person who came from the farthest away. Or maybe the instruction says to open the box and take out one of the smaller boxes inside and pass that to someone else. Whatever the instruction is, the person follows it and then passes the box on to the next person.
After the box has gone through a bunch of people, it ends up at a special room where all the boxes get opened and the message inside is put back together again. But no one at the party knows who the message was sent from or who it was sent to, because everyone just did what their piece of paper told them to do.
A mix network works in a similar way. It takes your message and splits it up into little pieces called packets. Each packet gets sent to a different server in the network, and each server just looks at the address on the packet and sends it on to the next server according to a set of rules. Those rules might say to wait a certain amount of time before sending the packet, or to route it to a specific server based on the address.
Eventually, all the packets get reassembled at the end of the network and your message comes out the other side. But because each packet went through so many different servers and was handled by so many different people, no one knows who sent the message or who it was sent to.