Hiding real IP addresses

With public keys as addresses it is straightforward to hide the real IP address: if the traffic goes through at least one intermediate node, then there is no way to know the real IP address of the device. To support such a use case Staex implements multi-hop routing: the network has tree-like topology and nodes always use shortest path between each other for the communication.

We accumulate routing tables of all the nodes in the root node. If a node can not find packet's destination in its own routing table, it forwards the packet to its parent until it reaches the root node. This means that the root node knows the topology of the whole network and can actually find the shortest path. This does not mean that the root node is different from others, in fact it runs the same program and makes routing decisions the same way as any other node. So, if you have another intermediate node between the leaf and the root and the destination node can be reached via this node, then the traffic will not reach root node at all. You can read more about the routing in the documentation.