At 12:00 PM 10/9/95 -0500, Kevin L Prigge wrote:
I seem to recall that someone was working on an anonymous http proxy a couple months ago. Pointers would be appreciated. Thanks.
We had discussed this at the last Bay Area Cypherpunks meeting (BTW, when/where is the next??), and came to the conclusion that it would be technologically simple, but load inefficient, to implement in a large scale at this point. The main problem with anonymous http (or telnet, talk, etc) lies in the sheer amount of information being transferred, and the even larger amount of noise an anonymous site would have to generate to defeat traffic analysis. A mail message is usually under a few K, but with these larger systems you move into the multiple meg realms; to hide a single individual's (ie,) 3K/sec stream, a provider would have to generate many times that in cover traffic. We can force traffic to the user from network speeds to slow down to modem speeds, but that doesn't help the inbound crunch at all. Web sites don't generally generate much inbound traffic, but when coupled with dialups (such as in my case) this could lead to bad service to the local modem users. The good news is, with multiple anon redirectors bouncing traffic between them to further confuse an attacker, the number of users can grow an order of magnitude without any additional load, since the streams are hiding in the midst of other streams and far less random cover traffic needs to be generated. Software-wise, an anonymous http scheme could be implemented with a standard proxy server with remote host access restrictions and log analysis tools to charge the appropriate individuals for their usage (a la anon email postage stamp rolls). Down the road, cover traffic, ecash payment, encryption, and other nifty toys can be added. If anyone on this list is in need of anonymous http right now (even to tinker with it) I'd be willing to set up a free-use proxy, as long as you don't bring our server or our pipe to their knees. Mail me (privately if you wish) with the individual IPs/names of the hosts you'd be coming in from - no blanket domain names, please, unless they're your own personal network. If I see enough interest I'll have a proxy up by next week. Have I missed anything? -- Jay Campbell - Regional Operations Manager -=-=-=-=-=-=- Sense Networking (Santa Cruz Node) edge@got.net "Shoot the Fruit Loop" "On the Information Superhighway, I'm the guy behind you in this morning's traffic jam leaning on his horn."