II. What's Neeeded
* Consider some things we like to talk about:
- alternatives to RSA (elliptic functions, etc.)
This isn't a technical problem, but I think having some RSA alternatives would put us in a better position politically. What sort of systems are availiable? (For my own personal inquisitiveness, I have developed some ideas for systems that might work, but I really can't be sure of their effectiveness/security.)
- secret-sharing protocols
You mean like DH? Alternatives to DH?
- remailer-specific code (adding latency, mixing, padding, etc.)
Well, Karl Barrus has done a lot of work here, but let me restate my call for more remailers - BTW: Why don't you set up a remailer on your Netcom account, since you seem to like them so much?
- dining cryptographers nets (DC-Nets, a la Chaum, Bos, etc.)
We could do this... You want to build a DC-Net for the remailers or something?
- digital cash (a vast area of diverse protocols for clearing transactions, for blinding, for detecting double-spending, etc.)
Yep, the old digicash problem...
- random number generators (Schneier, for example, supplies code fragments for the Blum-Blum-Shub generator...need I again say that probably few of us know how to "call" this code easily?)
We have lots of RNGs...What do you want to DO with them?
- code for message pools, for chaining remailers, etc.....a lot of this exists as scraps of Perl in various places.
Well, we have message pools, but perhaps software to automatically scan them and pick out messages for you would be helpful... Your point about the Crypto Toolkit is well-taken, especially in light of your comment about Mathematica. We need some sort of universal interface that everyone can use, that is easy to understand, and have it be able to work with different mail packages and different systems. Maybe we need some kind of new interpreted (for universal portability) data-manipulations language, so we can write crypto tools and everyone could use them on every platform. Or maybe we just need to write a cypherpunks mail program, that could automatically handle PGP, anonymous remailer chainings, and remailer reply protocols. I know Ian Smith was working on something like this... One other potential project - on-the-fly file encryption/decryption for multi-user unix systems would be a big plus for security (like secure drive but not for the whole disk). If a hacker got into you account, all they'd have is a bunch of encrypted files. We could set it up to work with existing accounts so that after you enter your account, you have to enter a second password to get to your files, preferably by secure key-exchange protocols. It's a shame I don't know enuf about unix to hack it myself. :(