At 1:52 PM -0700 6/20/97, John Smith wrote:
The resources used to break DES, if as many people hosted remailers and anonymizers on their machines, would further Cypherpunks goals a lot more than breaking DES, which we all know was breakable (as we know what "56 bits" means).
There were messages here some time back about systems like anonymizer but chainable and using cryptography. Did anything come of that? Efficient anonymous web browsing could be a killer app for crypto. Use anonymous web access to get to hotmail accounts like this one and you have anonymous email, easy to use.
A hurdle or speedbump is the one of latencies: * e-mail is expected, or accepted, to have latencies of minutes or even hours. And as the packet sizes of e-mail messages are typically small, e.g. 3 KB, adequate mixing or entropy can be gotten in a remailer by mixing 10 or so messages, repeated several times though various hops. * Web access is expected, or required, to be fast and peppy...people will hardly tolerate (i.e., will not use) a site which spends minutes between actions. Whether minutes are needed between actions depends on the degree of mixing sought, and the amount of other messages or Web accesses.... Also, a remailer can be done with *one way" paths, while Web accesses of course require two-way paths. Two-way paths present oft-discussed hurdles for anonymity. (Reply-blocks, message pools, etc.) These are not unresolvable problems, from what I can see, but are typical engineering tradeoffs, a la the usual: "Speed, anonymity, interactivity. Pick two." (Or something like this...) PipeNet will help. Several groups are sort of working on new schemes. I have my own thoughts about fixing this problem. --Tim May There's something wrong when I'm a felon under an increasing number of laws. Only one response to the key grabbers is warranted: "Death to Tyrants!" ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^1398269 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."