---------- From: Jim Choate[SMTP:ravage@einstein.ssz.com] Reply To: Jim Choate Sent: Thursday, October 12, 2000 7:09 PM To: cypherpunks@einstein.ssz.com Subject: CDR: Re: Anonymous Remailers cpunk
On Tue, 3 Oct 2000, Steve Furlong wrote:
<<Proposal to limit spam sent through anon remailers by requiring that the traffic be encrypted>>
Perhaps we're talking at cross purposes. This subthread came along because some people have noticed that anonymous remailers are used for an awful lot of spam. Peter Trei proposed that remailers could pass along only encrypted mail. My understanding was that Alice, the message's author, would encrypt the message with Bob's public key; Bob is the end recipient: a person or a mailing list or whatever. Alice would send the message through Ramona, the anonymous remailer. Ramona is requiring that messages be encrypted as a means of filtering out spam. Ramona does not need to know Bob's public or private keys; Ramona cares only that the message is encrypted.
So? I set up a email address that I offer to the spammers to sign up to the anonymous remailers and then it proxies their email into the encrypted network. I figure this baby'll stop'em for about six months.
Jim: A spammer (or your spammer's proxy) is not going to individually encrypt messages to thousands or millions of end-recipients, each with their own public key - the time factor makes this uneconomical, and the hassle factor of finding all the recipient public keys makes it impractical. Thus, only remailers which send out plaintext are useful to spammers as exit remailers. It is only exit remailers (ie, the remailer which sends to the final recipient) which get hassled for sending spam. The goal is to make remailer operators life easier by preventing them from being used to spam random lusers, who may initiate complaints against the remailer operator. It is not to prevent spam passing through a remailer somewhere in mid-cloud. While such encrypted spam will increase the volume of traffic, for most remailers that is a Good Thing - more material to confuse the traffic analysis. As long as it gets dropped before leaving the remailer network, no harm is done. Steve understands this, as does every one else but you. What's the problem?
For it to really stop spam it would need to be well distributed. So how do you offset the increased sys admin issues this raises?
Any remailer operator can decide not to pass along plaintext. So long as the message sender is aware of this property, nothing more needs to be distributed. There are no increased sysadmin issues.
Then there is the old key management problem.
James Choate
No, there is not, beyond the fact that the message originator must know the final recipient's public key. Jim, do you really understand how remailer chaining works? Peter Trei
Vizzini: HE DIDN'T FALL? INCONCEIVABLE! Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. - The Princess Bride