-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Quoth Jonathan Rochkind <jrochkin@cs.oberlin.edu>:
Part of our disagreement/misunderstanding might be in differing conceptions of the form the remailer net should take.
There should be two anonymous IDs, one for sending, one for receiving.
You seem to be talking about a Julf-style anon system, where the system knows who you really are. If the system is corrupt, if Julf were an NSA agent, then the entire system is compromised and useless. I like the cypherpunks remailer concept better, where each link in the chain only knows the next link in the chain, and security is achieved by multiple links. If several of the links are actually NSA agents, your security is reduced, but not compromised completely. If you've got a chain of, say 10 links, even if 7 of them are evil NSA agents, you still can probably retain your anonymity. Return addresses are accomplished by encrypted "resend-to:" blocks. It seems much preferable to have a system where it isn't neccesary to trust any one net entity completely, as it is in a Julf-style anon-ID system. [Of course one could use a combination of both in communications too, but I wouldn't feel safe unless my anonimity was safe even if the Finish FBI raided Julf's site.]
I have been worrying a lot about these anonymous return addresses. They seem very vulnerable to attack. Say I post a message through remailers to Cypherpunks giving one of these reply blocks. The TLA need only send a flood of known size messages to this address, and look to see where the pop out of the net of remailers. Even if all messages were quantized and only reconstructed by the final recipient, the TLA could send timed bursts of messages which (even with reordering) would allow a statistical determination of the recipient. I think that the solution to this is some sort of hold and forward on demand system. An anon ID would be posted to Cypherpunks, and that account ID with a key, sent to the message holder. One would then request for a certain number of messages or number of kilobytes of messages to be sent to the address specified by the old sort of remailer block. This message would be signed by the key, and could indicate remailing to anywhere, even to another hold and forward location. This prevents the TLA from sending many messages to the final destination in such a way that they could be used for traffic analysis. Thoughts? -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6 iQCVAgUBLkmSPVVkk3dax7hlAQGElQP7B14ChmebN2iEBRidpDFm1qrzbDRSE/Eh WGdcNwhn5wThxCKVaY6OjAgs61xMQPk7XGwO8MjJdZOAXCm9Mqos7wVEFaz5UqUV 7nnOcTHrCdCQcPULFt6mpjAug1KYtkFx+2NXa6PBzNTxkZ9Svh6Hk6mii/5p+dLH tEW3uihAERo= =tSI9 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -------------------------------------------------- Lance Cottrell who does not speak for CASS/UCSD loki@nately.ucsd.edu PGP 2.3 key available by finger or server. "Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra. Suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night the ice weasels come." --Nietzsche