Page 111 - Cyber Defense eMagazine RSAC Special Edition 2025

The Limitations of Standard Encryption

End-to-end encryption ensures that only the sender and recipient in a conversation can read the contents
of a message. However, it does not hide the metadata associated with the communication. This metadata
can include IP addresses, phone numbers, and unique identifiers, and can be used to identify and track
users. Centralized servers, common in many popular messaging platforms, further exacerbate this issue
by creating single points of data collection, vulnerable to government requests, data breaches, and
corporate misuse.

The Power of Onion Routing

Onion routing, or multi-hop routing, addresses these limitations by routing messages through multiple
nodes in a decentralized network. Onion routing ensures that each node only knows the previous source
and next destination in the chain, masking the sender and receiver's true identities from the content they
are sending. This makes it very difficult and costly for any single entity, including node operators, to trace
communications back to their origin.
In this era where privacy of our digital communications is increasingly under threat, here are 3 reasons
why encrypted messaging apps should adopt onion routing technology:

3 Reasons Why Encrypted Messaging Apps Should Use Onion Routing:

1. Anonymity and Privacy Protection

Onion routing enhances user anonymity by preventing network operators from linking messages to a
sender’s or recipient’s IP address. Messages are wrapped in multiple layers of encryption and relayed
through decentralized nodes, making it nearly impossible to trace which IP address is sending or
requesting specific messages. Additionally, by masking IP addresses, onion routing prevents the
exposure of users' approximate locations, further strengthening privacy.

2. Resistance to Surveillance and Metadata Collection

By encrypting each message multiple times in an “onion” before being sent over the network, onion
routing prevents metadata collection and analysis while a message is in transit. Unlike traditional services

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