- cypherpunks-legacy - lists.cpunks.org

Future of anonymity (short-term vs. long-term)
by Marc.Ringuette＠GS80.SP.CS.CMU.EDU 03 Mar '93

03 Mar '93

Lance Detweiler lists some problems with freely available anonymity, and suggests that those of us who are pushing for unrestricted anonymity are unwise. Many others on the list argue that unrestricted anonymity and privacy are necessary and even inevitable. First off, I should say that I think this is absolutely the most critical issue that we cypherpunks must address: how desirable is anonymity, what restrictions should we accept and/or push for, and what technological options can we offer as solutions? Secondly, I think that some of us are talking past each other, by ignoring the distinction between short-term and long-term solutions. Lance, for instance, concentrates on short-term problems with anonymity while ignoring some easy-to-implement fixes for these problems in the medium to long term. Tim May emphasizes the long-term inevitability of crypto anarchy while skipping lightly over the practical problems of sysops trying to keep their systems running in the short term. Let's recognize the distinction between short-term and long-term. To help you out, I offer this handy diagram, which I've filled in with my own opinions. Are restrictions on anonymity... Desirable Necessary Feasible ---------------------------------------------------- Short-term (3yrs) | No Some Yes | Medium-term (10yrs) | No No Partly | Long-term (20yrs) | No No Partly | ---------------------------------------------------- More discussion of specific issues to follow in another message. To sum up, my opinions are that in the short term, remailers must try to be good network citizens in order not to get kicked off the "one and only" network. In the long term, -- Marc Ringuette (mnr(a)cs.cmu.edu) Subject: Future of anonymity (SHORT-TERM) Lance Detweiler lists a few problems with freely available anonymity: - newsgroup noise - pornography GIFs - email bombs / crashed computers - Mafia & terrorist uses He seems to believe that the best way to combat these problems is to provide only limited anonymity, which is to be broken at the request of the proper authorities. [If I've misconstrued what you're saying, Lance, I apologize. Some cypherpunks are certainly saying this.] I disagree that it is necessary for a remailer operator to reveal the sender of a piece of mail under any circumstances, and I will not trust a remailer which does not IMMEDIATELY THROW AWAY the correspondence between input and output addresses. I won't try to argue in detail that partial anonymity is not very useful. I'll just say this: if a remailer operator must be a moral arbiter of when to release an anonymous address, then my assurance of anonymity becomes much more tenuous and subjective, and the legal burdens on the remailer operator become much greater. --- I'd now like to deal with the practical objections to this suggestion in the SHORT TERM. First, let's postulate that anonymity is a desirable thing to have, if we can limit its bad effects. If we could solve the worst of the practical problems, without keeping logs which allow tracing a message to its source, wouldn't it be desirable to do so? I would divide the problems into two types: problems with volume and problems with content. The first three of Lance's objections were volume problems; the last was a content problem. My answer to the problems with content: tough. It's a freedom of speech thing. The only legitimate concern I see, in the short term, is anonymous flooding. This is going to be one of the toughest objections to deal with in implementing an anonymous remailer, and one of the biggest practical concerns, because there is the real possibility of abuse of our poorly-controlled networks (for which the only remedy to date has been to trace the problem to its source). Here's my suggestion: let's provide remailers which guarantee not to flood the network with high volume, but keep no logs and are unable to trace messages back to their source. We can deal with the actual mechanism of such volume control later; my point is that I'm suggesting that the ONLY limitation we place on remailed messages is a volume limitation. This restriction could of course go away once we have digital postage stamps, but seems a reasonable one for remailers which don't charge money. Remailer operators will have I propose the following solution: that remailer operators voluntarily compile aggregate "volume reports" I would predict that the primary means by which anonymity will be restricted are: short-term: crackdowns on anonymous remailing sites medium to long term: by convincing most people to participate in "real person only" newsgroups and to use "real person only" email handlers. These limitations could be implemented via the PEM public key hierarchy, for instance.

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Re: Future of anonymity (short-term vs. long-term)
by pmetzger＠shearson.com 03 Mar '93

03 Mar '93

> From: Theodore Ts'o <tytso(a)athena.mit.edu> > > Since John Gilmore, the maintainer of the Cypherpunks mailing list, is > one of the absolute free speach advocates --- let me ask a question > directly at you: What would you do if sometime next week, someone > decided to flood the Cypherpunks mailing list with a large amount of > trash postings, routed through different combinations of remailers? Let > us assume that the trash is generated by grabbing varying snippets from > USENET articles, so that current AI technology is not able to > distinguish a true Cypherpunks submission from the flooded trash > postings. What would you do? Now let's also suppose someone does the > same thing to all of the GNU newsgroups. What would you do then? > I know what I would do: I'd rig the list so it only took PGP signed messages, and then only from official subscribers. They could be anonymous, but they'd have to be operating under "known" pseudonyms. This is a "closed" list -- the Extropians list in principle works under much the same mechanism, only without PGP. This being in place, people who had not joined could not flood the list, and anyone flooding the list could be cut off. Note that just because one is in favor of free speech does not mean that one would necessarily permit arbitrary disruptions in one's living room, and being the list "owner" I think John would be much within his rights to stop non-communicative disruptive "noise" postings. > (Sorry for sounding so cynical, but after being a News admin at MIT for > a long time, and dealing with a lot of people suffering from severe > cases of freshmanitis, I have a less than optimistic view about human > nature.) I think that instead you should have a less than optimistic view of the quality of our current netnews software. The problem you list can be fixed with public key cryptography and some intelligent changes. For instance, there is an easy fix to the "idiots posting newgroups" messages that I heard Nat Howard propose years ago -- use public key signatures on newgroup messages, and each news administrator picks other administrators he trusts in the same sort of "web of trust" notion that PGP has. If the newgroup/delgroup message was posted by someone you trust you take it, otherwise you reject it. Given that, you are practically done. As another example, its easy to assure that moderated newsgroups are run just by the moderator -- he public key signs instead of posting with the "Authorized" header. Easy as pi. Perry

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anon.penet.fi hacking
by Hal 03 Mar '93

03 Mar '93

Eric shows a complicated regular expression, but I don't think it will match just --, because this line provides nothing to match the "." and "[^B]", etc. I think the real point is that Eric's idea allows the user to customize the regular expression to match the particular signature line used by his system. If the line is just --, he can use Eric's simple example. If it's something else, another line can be used to look for the match. Since it's not hard for users to find out how their signatures look it should not be hard to set up a pattern that will strip them. Hal

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Re: Handling Abuses of Remailers
by arcticus!Xenon 03 Mar '93

03 Mar '93

In article <CypherPunksList.0606(a)arcticus.UUCP> tcmay(a)netcom.com (Timothy C. May) writes: > * To handle _abusive volumes_ through remailers, charge for remailing. > Short term, this may be a problem, but this is the long term market > solution. Quick but relevant question: Assuming a commercial anonymous remailer were set up tomorrow, with (don't ask me how this would be done, it's hypothetical...) provable anonymity -- what should it charge per message, or per kilobyte of message? > -Tim May > tcmay(a)netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero Chris - Xenon -- Xenon%arcticus(a)burner.com = Chris Hanson | Lord Xenon | Kelson Haldane I work, but you don't know who I work for, and I'm not on their machine(s). "There is no Truth. There is only Perception. To Perceive is to Exist." - Xen Home (303)745-0108|Work (303)696-8973|Flames (976)DEV-NULL|PGP2.1 key by req.

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Re: more ideas on anonymity
by pmetzger＠shearson.com 03 Mar '93

03 Mar '93

> From: Theodore Ts'o <tytso(a)athena.mit.edu> > I see. So you don't believe in libel or slander laws. > > And NBC was perfectly justified in faking an explosion in a GM truck to > show it was unsafe, and broadcast it on prime-time TV. And it didn't do > anybody any harm at all. Uh huh. > > Try again..... I believe that Theodore is confusing the notion of tort and the notion of crime. Slander and Libel are torts, that is, they are civil matters. Prior restraint of speech is brought up in the context of CRIMINAL acts. As an example, obviously, if I promise you that what I am about to tell you is the true formula for a drug who's design I am selling you and I lie, I am liable under our contract. Also similarly, it is possible under various legal arguments to consider slander to be a tort. However, it is something different if the government claims that my saying "all green people should be killed" is a crime. Now, on the issue of slander, the notion of anonymity is largely unimportant. If I had walked into the middle of the street and ranted for an hour saying that GM trucks are unsafe, that would be largely ignored, as most anonymous denunciations likely are. The issue is if a non-anonymous individual or entity with credibility, like NBC, says something that is false. Perry

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REMAIL: Usage stats.
by Hal 03 Mar '93

03 Mar '93

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- I got mail from a remailer operator asking how he could keep some information about how much his remailer was being used without keeping logs of the messages. This seemed like a good feature so I have added it to my maildelivery file. This is how it looks now: # # field pattern action/ string # result (quote included spaces) # Request-Remailing-To "" pipe R "date >> LOG.REMAIL" Request-Remailing-To "" pipe A remail.pl Anon-To "" pipe R "date >> LOG.REMAIL" Anon-To "" pipe A remail.pl Encrypted PGP pipe R "date >> LOG.ENCRYPTED" Encrypted PGP pipe A pgpmail.pl * "" pipe ? recurse.pl The lines which say "date >> LOG.XXX" will append one line to the LOG.* file each time a remailing or decryption is done. That line will tell when it is done. No other information is kept to allow reconstruction of who sent the message or what it was. You can use "wc" to count how many lines are in the files, archive and/or delete them periodically, or do whatever you like. A couple of notes: When you have more than one line that matches a particular field/pattern (defined in the first two columns), use the letter R for the result code for the first ones, and A for the last. Also, be SURE you put quotes around the command string if it is more than one word. Otherwise ALL of your mail will DISAPPEAR! (I need to do a little work on the slocal.pl script to make it more robust about this. :-) If you're using slocal rather than slocal.pl this should still work. Hal Finney -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.1 iQCVAgUBK5Qqe6gTA69YIUw3AQEYiAQArkTzGy4b2oFetX/AOzXjZ9Wpv8zlthCa rDs54X0mhw2fqe1zRt8VNw4X66qNwV1niyBMJV37IQsiCJVKXYI1ey3bRD5xNKGx FSZogubeoxIJFvKcVnLTe0l6bsRZpzSPRaePslXZsxb0t3ysDKKnzX0GJe0Zg8k0 +4d1mh8q5qQ= =+Bo3 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Mailing request.
by Alexander Chislenko 03 Mar '93

03 Mar '93

Could somebody send me today's mail? I lost it :( Thanks. Alex.

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Re: You Aren't [I'm Not]
by DrZaphod 03 Mar '93

03 Mar '93

> Date: Tue, 2 Mar 93 10:51:31 EST > From: pmetzger(a)shearson.com (Perry E. Metzger) > > **You aren't arguing for non-anonymity.** You are arguing that free > speech is bad. > > In Message Tue, 2 Mar 93 16:57:22 -0500, > Theodore Ts'o <Athena.MIT.EDU!tytso(a)netcomsv.netcom.com> writes: > >**No, I am not argueing for non-anonymity.** Please stop defending your >position by putting misrepresentations in my mouth. Aren't these the same thing? TTFN! [Waiting for reply: "That's the same thing!"] DrZaphod [AC/DC] / [DnA][HP] [drzaphod(a)ncselxsi.uucp] Technicolorized

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Re: Piercing anonymitiy and censorship
by pmetzger＠shearson.com 03 Mar '93

03 Mar '93

> From: Theodore Ts'o <tytso(a)athena.mit.edu> > > Date: Tue, 2 Mar 93 14:15:15 EST > From: pmetzger(a)shearson.com (Perry E. Metzger) > > Of course there are ways -- and they need not be so drastic. You could, > for instance, simply prevent non-subscribers from posting to your list, > and use public key to verify identities. This would allow you to swiftly > stop abuse. I've already noted this twice. You've claimed this is impractical, > but the tools to do this, AND WITHOUT PATENT PROBLEMS, already exist and > would be cheap to implement. > > If they are so cheap to implement them, could someone please implement > them FOR THE USENET GROUPS? (Where you don't have a concept of > subscribers or non-subscribers?) I don't have time Ted, I have really busy schedule. But, this is the thumbnail of what you want. 1. Build a decent tool to handle the public key sigs on news format message files and tell you if the file sender corresponds with the signature -- a variant on RIPEM (more like a half hour hack) should be able to do this. 2. Change the shell scripts handling incoming control messages inside the news software to check signatures against a trusted list. 3. Set some scripts handling incoming moderated newsgroups that check the signature against a trusted list. 4. Build a tool that checks that incoming signed messages correspond with signatures stored in the signature database for the site, and somehow flag non-authenticated or otherwise bogus signed messages. Add a header line to give out this info so rn and other newsreaders can nuke non-authenticated messages or what have you. Sounds like this begins to give you a large fraction of what you want without changing too much, and I bet its a few days of hacking. Its primitive, but it seems like the right thing for a start and you can take it from there. I specify keeping signatures on your news server and checking them there to keep users from needing special new newsreaders and to keep them from needing to run the signature code over and over again; presumably they can trust their sysadmin and if they cant they can get new tools so they don't have to. > I here lots of *talk* of how easy it is to do this, or how easy it is to > do that. If it's so easy, why doesn't someone prove it to the rest of > us by actually doing it. I hate to bring the Real World down upon you > guys, but talk is cheap; code sometimes isn't. As I've said, I don't have time myself, but the above is really easy for someone with a good knowledge of C News, RIPEM and the like. The hardest part is handling a key database and doing key management since RIPEM has no such provisions, but you can likely fix that. Then there is the issue of getting RSA to permit your hacks to RIPEM to get out, which I suspect they would. Okay, maybe not a few days, but certainly not much of a challenge here and you have the start of the system we were talking about. Among other things, it fixes forged control messages (presumably you would leave cancel messages alone, but it could let you authenticate newgroup and delgroups, which is a big problem), forged moderated messages, and give you the start of what you would need to start ignoring unsigned messages or messages from users you don't like on newsgroups. The stuff for non-moderated newsgroups would be primitive, but it would be a start and would let users have the option of deciding what they want to do with non-authenticated messages. Perry

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Re: Future of anonymity (short-term vs. long-term)
by pmetzger＠shearson.com 03 Mar '93

03 Mar '93

> From: Theodore Ts'o <tytso(a)athena.mit.edu> > > Date: Tue, 2 Mar 93 10:51:31 EST > From: pmetzger(a)shearson.com (Perry E. Metzger) > > You aren't arguing for non-anonymity. You are arguing that free > speech is bad. > > No, I am not argueing for non-anonymity. Please stop defending your > position by putting misrepresentations in my mouth. > > Believe me, I understand why anonymity has its features. I am just > pointing out some of its bad sides, which you seem to refuse to accept > even exist. Of course I accept that they exist. However, I believe the benefits outweigh the problems, and in any case it matters little what we think since we cannot reasonably stop such systems from arising. > If the only way you can defend your position is by ranting and raving > and calling me a censorship-loving Nazi, then perhaps we should just end > this discussion right here. I don't believe I called you a Nazi. I also believe you took my quote out of context. Perry

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