-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- tcmay@netcom.com wrote:
Chaumian digital mixes--what you Americans call "remailers"--mainly solves the sender anonymity problem. Message pools, or broadcast to a group or site that includes the receiver, mainly deals with receiver anonymity. The combination of the two deals with both.
Both are solved elegantly with the Dining Cryptographer's Protocol, about which much is written on this list every few months. Messages are "sent" in an Ouija-board fashion and received by the person who can successfully decrypt a public message sent over the system.
I tend to favor remailers + broadcasting + anonymous-return-addresss over the DC-Net protocol. Let me list some of their relative advantages and disadvantages. Please add to these if you can think of more... Advantages of DC-Net over remailers - more flexible trust relationships - you can add your buddies to the set of people who have to be compromised to trace you - lower latency - don't have to wait for remailers to collect enough mail for batches - untracibility need not depend on assumptions about the enemy's computational power Disadvantages of DC-Net - complexity - explaining the core concepts of a remailer takes only a couple of lines, as opposed to a couple of screens for a DC-Net Implementation of a DC-Net seems to be an order of magnitude harder as well. - more vulnerable to denial of service attacks - MUCH higher bandwidth costs I think over the long run the last factor will be most important. In a DC-Net, for each bit one participant wants to send to another, EVERY OTHER participant must broadcast a bit to ALL participants. I can imagine a remailer-net with one million users, but I don't see any possibility that a DC-Net can be scaled to that size. Wei Dai -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBLzboXjl0sXKgdnV5AQEqqAP+JU2sgiESnFZm+CCgNNboXnL3uKg0GP4Z y6NV+U56yGvPKzsi9suUiOpbuzwsYVaMnWIuqRCOaxic75SFsDi0NvjE1K4JgyXz aoyVs1i+xlFKnfmZr1+7EAheUq7wlfSWdp0cnAhbNWSrC3cSuDiNGYciJQLW8GGv 3YUvmW+Xoj0= =Aa+t -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- E-mail: Wei Dai <weidai@eskimo.com> URL: "http://www.eskimo.com/~weidai" =================== Exponential Increase of Complexity =================== --> singularity --> atoms --> macromolecules --> biological evolution --> central nervous systems --> symbolic communication --> homo sapiens --> digital computers --> internetworking --> close-coupled automation --> broadband brain-to-net connections --> artificial intelligence --> distributed consciousness --> group minds --> ? ? ?