# Onion Messages ### Onion Messages Demystified [Blog post](https://lightningdevkit.org/blog/onion-messages-demystified/) by [[Valentine Wallace]] on [[2022-10-04]] for [[Lightning Dev Kit|LDK]] blog (excerpts) If Alice doesn’t want to reveal lots of personal information about her channels and UTXOs, she can use cryptography to create an obfuscated or “blinded” route to herself for the sender (we’ll call him Bob) to send an onion message along. To construct this route, she’ll first find a route to herself from some PopularNode in the graph that has a lot of peers. By selecting PopularNode from this network chart, Alice’s anonymity set includes all highlighted peers: ![[Pasted image 20221024154401.png]] To Bob and any other observers, any node within two hops of PopularNode could be the destination of the onion message. Adding more hops further expands Alice’s anonymity set. (Note that PopularNode’s direct peers are candidates because blinded routes may contain fake dummy hops.) After selecting the path from PopularNode, she’ll create an encrypted blob for each hop that contains information about reaching the next hop, which ends at her node. At this point, the blinded route looks like this: ![[Pasted image 20221024154413.png]] Finally, she’ll provide this blinded route to Bob, who will find a route to PopularNode and use Alice’s blinded route when constructing the last three hop payloads within the onion packet.