Paper 2025/971 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2025/971 ↗

Sabot: Efficient and Strongly Anonymous Bootstrapping of Communication Channels

Abstract

Anonymous communication is vital for enabling individuals to participate in social discourse without fear of marginalization or persecution. An important but often overlooked part of anonymous communication is the bootstrapping of new communication channels, generally assumed to occur out-of-band. However, if the bootstrapping discloses metadata, communication partners are revealed even if the channel itself is fully anonymized. We propose Sabot, the first anonymous bootstrapping protocol that achieves both strong cryptographic privacy guarantees and bandwidth-efficient communication. In Sabot, clients cooperatively generate a private relationship matrix, which encodes who wants to contact whom. Clients communicate with k ≥ 2 servers to obtain “their” part of the matrix and augment the received information using Private Information Retrieval (PIR) to learn about their prospective communication partners. Compared to previous solutions, Sabot achieves stronger privacy guarantees and reduces the bandwidth overhead by an order of magnitude.