Rumman Layer RMN/3: A Verifiable Threshold Multipath Onion Overlay — Design, Implementation, Security Analysis and Measurement

The Onion, the Garlic, and the Pomegranate: A Third Strategy Beyond the Dark Web's Two Familiar Layers Discussions of the "dark web" usually reduce to two overlay designs. Tor, theonion, sends one message along one circuit and peels a layer of encryption ateach hop. I2P, the garlic, bundles several messages into a single tunnel. Iwanted to know what a third layer would look like if the operation were neitherwrapping nor bundling, but splitting. The pomegranate is that third operation. Rumman Layer (RMN/3) splits onemessage into n Feldman-verifiable Shamir (k,n) threshold shares. Each sharetakes its own independently sampled three-hop X25519-keyed onion path. Thedestination reassembles the message only after k shares arrive and passverification. No relay, including the last hop, sees a share. A blind directorypublishes public keys only, an end-to-end AES-GCM layer sits inside the onion,and replay suppression plus commitment-ID pinning close the protocol gaps. Three points deserve to be stated plainly, since they matter more than themetaphor. This is not a new invention: Shamir (1979), Chaum (1981), PSMT(1993), SPREAD (2001-09), Information Slicing (2007), Conflux (2013) and PolyOnions (2022) cover every ingredient. It is not "better than Tor or I2P" — thearchitectures are Pareto-incomparable: RMN/3 wins on path-loss tolerance,per-share verifiability and resistance to local interception, and loses onbandwidth (exactly 5x at n=5), latency, deployment maturity and resistance toa global passive adversary. And it is not an anonymity tool for real use:there is no cover traffic, no mixing, no Sybil defence and no independentaudit. What I have written down is the whole construction. More than two hundredpages set out the byte-level wire format, the proofs and the actual source ofsecurity (unconditional Shamir privacy for the shares, computationalcommitments and AEAD for the rest), a corrected adversary bound for an earlierplaintext last-hop mistake, 41 conformance checks, six sections ofmeasurements, a thirty-entry attack catalogue, a twenty-five-item weaknessregister, the complete source code, raw benchmark data and a byte-for-bytewire capture of one message. Paper: "Rumman Layer RMN/3: A Verifiable Threshold Multipath Onion Overlay —Design, Implementation, Security Analysis and Measurement"Zenodo: 10.5281/zenodo.23897239https://zenodo.org/records/10.5281/zenodo.23897239Author on Zenodo: Al-Dawoodiya, Al-Mu'taz Billah Salah, IndependentResearcher, Amman, JordanCode (MIT): <I didn't post it, I uploaded the test files on Zenodo.>Monograph text: CC BY 4.0 Corrections are welcome. Appendix I of the paper is a public corrections log,and Chapter 10 lists the open problems. #OnionRouting #I2P #GarlicRouting #DarkWeb #Cryptography #SecretSharing#FeldmanVSS #PrivacyResearch #NetworkSecurity #OpenSource #Zenodo#ResearchIntegrity