[Medea]

I am having trouble understanding the main purpose of this protocol. After looking at your code example, I want to ask: what is the benefit of using this instead of an AEAD (Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data) that is already available in Rust? What specific security guarantee does this give me that would help when I am building protocols?

[bilekas]

It's just a privacy-preserving network layer communication protocol, think onion router. Removing the dependency on third party verification.

Some further reading : https://netsec.ethz.ch/publications/papers/ariadne.pdf

it's generally seen as more secure and in cases more efficient.

> Ariadne enhances previous approaches to preserve communication privacy by introducing two novelties. First, the source route is encoded in a fixed size, sequentially encrypted vector of routing information elements, in which the elements' positions in the vector are pseudo-randomly permuted. Second, the temporary keys used to process the packets on the path are referenced using mutually known encrypted patterns. This avoids the use of an explicit key reference that could be used to de-anonymize the communications.

[Medea]

Are you sure it is the same Ariadne? The paper you linked is from 2002 and does not mention aperiodic or "Cryptographic Virtual Machine"