Shye 1.0: A Heartbeat-Driven Protocol Core for Hop-by-Hop Random Forwarding in Adversarial Decentralized Networks

Path construction in anonymous communication commonly relies on a relay directory or previously established multi-hop relationships. When node availability and connectivity continue to change, and access to a global relay directory is restricted or blocked, a sender may be unable to preconstruct and maintain a complete path. This paper presents Shye 1.0, a heartbeat-driven protocol core for hop-by-hop random forwarding that advances message state along a short-lived forwarding chain. Heartbeat rounds schedule claim windows, retries, and expiry checks, while predetermined beacon rounds supply future public random material. Candidates obtain recomputable forwarding eligibility under a public threshold, and the current selector authorizes one selected forwarder from its local eligible-claim set. Signed SelectionGrant and HandoffWitness objects describe a state transition, while StateProof traces the current holder's authority to the sender-created InitCertificate. In the normative transparent implementation, one transition record is appended at every hop. Proof length therefore grows linearly with the number of traversed hops and is bounded by the initial TTL; TTL and an absolute expiry round jointly bound the lifetime of an honestly forwarded chain. The paper states four limited properties: eligibility soundness, transcript-relative honest selection, rooted authorization continuity, and bounded honest propagation. Because claim propagation depends on local views, the protocol verifies the eligibility and authorization of the selected node without proving candidate-set completeness or network-wide agreement on one selection. Cover traffic and a one-shot mailbox are retained only as conditional profiles for anonymous communication. Guaranteed delivery, end-to-end anonymity, Sybil resistance, and performance require deployment-specific mechanisms and experiments. The present manuscript supplies a protocol specification and a conformance boundary; it reports no performance, delivery-rate, or anonymity results. This record contains the English manuscript and a Chinese reference version of Shye 1.0, manuscript version 1.0.5.